Who's the adult in this picture?

A dad is reading a magazine in a laundromat, while a polite teenager across the room - a daughter he never knew he had until recently - chats with a sweet old lady about a lottery ticket they found crumpled on the floor. Eventually dad gets into the conversation, telling them how they can cash in the ticket even though it's one digit off the winning number.

It turns out that Dad is a con artist, and his idea of loving parenthood is to teach his duplicitous games to his offspring - who shows surprising aptitude, by the way.

Next month's "Matchstick Men," starring Nicolas Cage and Alison Lohman, is just one of about 10 movies this year that focus on female characters trying to work out their relationship with a parent. Certainly, precocious or misunderstood children have grown up on film for decades - "Freaky Friday" is a remake of a 1976 film, after all, and the con man/young girl duo has been around at least since Ryan and Tatum O'Neal hung their "Paper Moon." If classics like "The Graduate" or "Rebel Without a Cause" were remade today, they could be titled "Dude, Where's My Dad? Or Mom? Or Any Responsible Adult At All?"

But what's notable is both the sheer number of these films, and the fact that all of them focus on teenage girls rather than junior James Deans. The success of everything from small films like "Whale Rider" to the more mainstream "Friday" marks a dramatic shift from Hollywood's perennial fixation on male audiences, especially in the warm-weather season.

These films portray adult-child relationships as more complex than the writers of "Father Knows Best" dared even to suggest. At the multiplex, social trends show up not in "problem pictures" that tackle them head on, but in films that aim for boffo box-office returns by capturing current moods through mixtures of entertainment, escapism, and recognizable situations.

So, as in the real world, most of the young protagonists in these movies live in homes where divorce, remarriage, and other disruptive events have badly skewed the status quo. Undisturbed nuclear families are few and far between.

"What this new basketful of Hollywood movies really suggests about our culture is not that kids and adults understand one another less than ever before," says Murray Pomerance, chair of the sociology department at Ryerson University in Toronto and coeditor of the book "Sugar, Spice, and Everything Nice: Cinemas of Girlhood." "Rather it's that ... they understand one another more," Professor Pomerance explains. "Kids have more and more responsibility earlier and earlier; adults behave more and more irresponsibly later and later in life."

Take "How to Deal," starring Mandy Moore as Halley Martin, a teenager whose skepticism toward romance keeps her from dating the irresistible guy (Trent Ford). But a millimeter below the surface is a serious subtext: Halley has learned much of her cynicism by watching her mother, father, and sister go through relationships that are superficial at best, misery-inducing at worst. How can adults like these guide a girl to the emotional fulfillment she'd love to have - but fears doesn't exist?

We're meant to smile at "Uptown Girls," but again there's much to be read between the lines. Brittany Murphy plays Molly Gunn, a spoiled but sweet young woman who becomes the nanny of "Ray" Schleine, an equally spoiled but not-so-sweet little girl. As in "How to Deal," the screenplay is engineered so each main character learns valuable life lessons from the other, leading to a feel-good finale.

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