With Kit Kittredge: An American Girl finally opening in limited release on Wednesday, it seemed like a good time to take a look at other films girls in the same age demographic might also enjoy. As a mother of three daughters, I like to seek out films that have strong female characters. So many of the roles for females in Hollywood either fall into blatant stereotypes or position young girls and women as existing on this planet primarily for the pleasures of the male half of the species, and I don't want my girls growing up believing the images of women they're exposed to through the media. Of course, everything in life doesn't have to have a political agenda -- what fun would that be? So some of these are just films my own daughters very much enjoy, that the girl in your life might like also.

Here are seven great films for fans of American Girl books and movies ... let me know what others I've missed that you like; with only seven slots to work with, I had to leave out a lot of films I otherwise would have included ...

I just got back from a brief Christmas holiday to the distant land of relatives and limited Internet access, so my column is just a tad late this week. Nevertheless, I'd like to pick up where I left off last week, in my celebration of those smaller films that lost their way in 2007, either misunderstood, or misjudged, or just never found.

I saw Hal Hartley's Fay Grim in May as part of the San Francisco International Film Festival. It was a sequel to his 1998 film Henry Fool and it had one of those strange near-simultaneous releases in which it debuted on DVD just a few days after it opened in theaters. This technique didn't work at all for Steven Soderbergh's superb Bubble last year, so I can't imagine why anyone would try it again. I found Henry Fool too long with too much navel gazing to be of interest, but somehow Fay Grim worked for me. I felt it was all a huge, deadpan joke that these pathetic writer-types would now be involved in international intrigue. And who is better for a deadpan joke than Jeff Goldblum, with his glaring eyes and sharp delivery?

Lately, there have been three kinds of comedies, the stupid comedy is the most common, and the very occasional smart comedy pops up every so often, but the most intriguing kind is the smart-stupid comedy. The smart-stupid comedy is a movie that looks stupid and pretends to be stupid, but is actually very smart. Critics and audiences can very easily detect which of these movies is which, and everyone seems to prefer the smart-stupid brand. Examples from recent years include Office Space, Napoleon Dynamite, Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle, Wedding Crashers, The 40 Year-Old Virgin, Clerks II, Borat, Talladega Nights, Blades of Glory, The Simpsons Movie and the new Superbad. Even the Jackass movies -- which I haven't seen -- have their defenders among the intellectual elite.

If you can strike this formula, you're in for box office and critical gold -- and perhaps even an Oscar nomination. Knocked Up (297 screens) has been one of the summer's most enjoyable movies and one its biggest surprises. I almost didn't attend a press screening because it looked like a variation on the dreadful American Pie movies, but the buzz got to me and I went, and I'm glad I did. Judd Apatow's movie isn't much different from the formula of a beautiful girl redeeming a pathetic schlub, but this time it feels as if it came from a genuine place, as if the schlub really felt these things and was expressing his gratitude. For the lowbrows in the audience, Apatow gives his hero a selection of even dorkier roommates with lots of hilarious, shocking things to say and do, but the movie's main drive is pure.

Let me say this right up front: I loved Nancy Drew books when I was a kid, and I have a 10-year-old daughter who loves them just as much now as I did years ago. So ever since it was first announced a Nancy Drew movie was being made, and that it was going to star Emma Roberts (Aquamarine), my daughter and I have been eagerly anticipating the film's release date. I hoped "they" wouldn't mess it up -- it feels sometimes like there's this office full of mysterious "them" out there in Hollywood somewhere, who are paid large salaries to do little more than sit around drumming up ways to screw up potentially good films. Fortunately for the tween set, at whom Nancy Drew is primarily targeted, "they" were apparently otherwise engaged while this film was being developed, because it's pretty darn good.

I'd wondered how the filmmakers would handle bringing Nancy Drew into 2007 --after all, this is the teen detective who sleuths while wearing neatly-pressed dresses and polished penny loafers, and whose sometime-boyfriend, the wholesome and sporty Ned Nickerson, wishes his gal would rather bake pies than solve mysteries. Nancy's transition to the 21st century was actually handled rather deftly: the film is set in today, but Nancy, whose mother died when she was a baby, lives in the past. She makes her own nifty-looking clothes from her mother's old dress patterns (look for Nancy's nifty retro look to be a new fashion trend with the tween and teen set if this film really hits big), drives a sporty, powder-blue vintage roadster, and keeps her sleuthing stuff organized in a handy kit complete with a silver tin for carrying around homemade lemon bars and blondies (all the better for bribing bureaucrats when you need to get at confidential information).

This upcoming Nancy Drew movie must be off the chain, y'all! Generally, you don't hear about a sequel until ... the first movie has come out. And even then, it helps that the movie is a success. Well, Warner Brothers must have complete and total faith in this project, because they've announced Part 2 before Part 1 has even hit theaters. Emma Roberts (niece of Julia, daughter of direct-to-video staple Eric) is playing Nancy Drew, and it looks like she's got a franchise on her hands. Producer Jerry Weintraub and director Andrew Fleming are doing both Drew films with Roberts, as well as something called Rodeo Girl, another family film, with Roberts portraying a "debutante equestrian" (can you put that on a resume?) who tries to win over a cowboy by entering a rodeo competition. Fleming did the excellent political comedy Dick and the not-so-excellent remake of The In-Laws.

The character of Nancy Drew has been around in book form since the 30s, and she has made it to the big and small screen many times before. For those of you concerned that Nancy '07 will be modernized into a Paris Hilton clone, Weintraub offers this reassurance: "She's not a hip kid. She's right out of a Norman Rockwell painting." The plot of the new Drew has Nancy joining her father (played by Tate Donovan) on a business trip to Los Angeles, "where she happens upon clues to a murder mystery involving a movie star." Rachael Leigh Cook (of the criminally underrated -- seriously -- Josie and the Pussycats) will also appear. Nancy Drew wasn't really on my radar when I was a kid, but I know there's enough material to keep this series going for a long, long time. My question is, when are we going to see The Boxcar Children up on the big screen! I used to love those wacky orphans!

I'm guessing the box office success of the Harry Potter flicks has made studio greenlighters take another look at the tween/teen demographic, because there are quite a few film adaptations of books targeted at that age group in the works. And I'm glad to see this, because my nine-year-old is getting to the stage where films for younger kids -- the Over the Hedges and the Ant Bullies -- are more of a cinematic snack than a satisfying movie meal. She's waiting with bated breath for the next Harry Potter film and the last book in the series, but is also aware that the series is coming to an end and thus has been hunting out more tween books to satiate her literary needs. Much as she likes to read, though, she also loves to see films made out of her favorite books. Here's a short list of movies on the horizon that will hopefully meet her expectations, and mine as well: