First of all, I'd like to commend whoever is in charge of booking movies in any of the four State College theaters for getting zero new movies last week.

That's right. Zero.

Not even the once-reliable Garman Opera House or the 12-screen Premiere Theaters picked up any of the vast amount of indies currently circulating the more movie-friendly areas of the country right now.

Luckily, winter break is fast upon us, which means you'll be in Philly or Pittsburgh or wherever you come from that happens to be in close proximity to movies that don't suck.

One of those movies is Finding Neverland, deemed good enough to win best picture of 2004 from the National Board of Review, but not as appropriate for an audience of budding collegiate scholars as, say, Spongebob Squarepants, by local theater owners.

Neverland follows Peter Pan author J.M. Barrie (Johnny Depp) while he is penning what would become his most famous work and spending time with the Davies family, which consists of four fatherless boys and their loving mother, Sylvia (Kate Winslet).

Together, Barrie and the boys use their imagination to create elaborate fantasy worlds, rendered in the film with highly imaginative visual effects in a manner that seems vaguely reminiscent of Peter Jackson's superb Heavenly Creatures. Also like that film, this exhilarating innocence is viewed with skepticism by civilized society, particularly Barrie's own neglected wife and Sylvia's imperious mother.

If Barrie provides the boys with a knack for creativity and a fun-loving father figure, they provide him with inspiration as he concocts one of the most memorable children's stories ever written.

When this idyllic world gets hit with a sudden, sobering dose of reality, however, Barrie and the Davies are all forced to grow up a little bit.

Neverland is just what Oscar voters are looking for this or any year -- it's a stylistically and structurally conservative bio-pic with sentimental tendencies that comes packaged with surefire acting nominations for its leads, Depp and Winslet.

Despite its seemingly insidious Oscar-bait surface, though, I actually found the film charming -- sort of a throwback to the less cynical period in the early '80s when good directors used to make tear-jerking family fare like this.

One thing that's clear about director Marc Forster after only seeing two of his films -- the other being 2001's Monster's Ball -- is that he gets some pretty superb performances from his actors. In the wrong hands, this material could have devolved into a rancid stew of schmaltz, but luckily his cast makes it work. Depp, in particular, makes a strong Oscar bid by playing against type as a soft-spoken, compassionate genius and selling it every step of the way.

The film's weakest moments were the by-the-numbers comic relief segments related to the production of Peter Pan. "Hilarity" ensues, for instance, when one of the distinguished actors learns that he is playing a dog; the joke proceeds to resurface in diminished forms several times more until whatever humor there was is completely deflated.

Watching these sequences inevitably stirs up memories of the funnier moments of Shakespeare in Love, but Neverland's attempts to emulate that film's snarky, historical humor appear slight in comparison.

The best thing about Neverland is the plausible benevolence of Forster's vision as championed by Depp and the surprisingly empathic young actors who play the Davies children. The rich, warm lighting and softly transcendent soundtrack coalesce with the performances to create a convincing, heartfelt portrait that ultimately mirrors the timeless themes of Peter Pan itself.