Starring Dakota Fanning, Kurt Russell, and Kris Kristofferson. Rated G. For showtimes, please see page 70

As long as there are little girls and little boys, there will be horse movies, and as long as there are horse movies, they'll look a lot like Dreamer: Inspired by a True Story. The standard story goes something like this: said horse is either too wild or badly injured; evil people want to put it down; family pulls together to nurse it and/or train it, and”¦ Well, you can pretty much bet on the outcome.

Occasionally, a movie like Seabiscuit or the animated Spirit: Stallion of the Cimarron trots out a new take on this formula, which dates back to National Velvet and The Black Stallion. Dreamer is not one of those films. But as this genre goes, it's got enough charm to win you over.

The disarmingly unaffected Dakota Fanning, playing Cale Crane, has a lot to do with generating that charm. With her frizzy hair, baggy clothes, and missing teeth, she's never precious. The plot is extremely loosely based on a true story (there was no little girl involved, sorry to report). At Cale's pleading, trainer dad Ben (Kurt Russell) saves a champion racehorse with a broken leg-not from the shotgun, but from the dripping needle they use these days. He decides to nurse Soñador back to health at his long-empty barn, part of the farm that now faces foreclosure. At the same time, his family has some healing to do, as the once workaholic Ben reconnects with his wife (Elisabeth Shue), child (Fanning), and gruff father (Kris Kristofferson, who turns looking grizzled into an art form).

The preternaturally young-looking Russell centres a strong enough cast around the light material, with the only misstep being perennial bad guy Luí­s Guzmán portraying a kindly, kid-loving Mexican trainer. (You keep waiting for him to pull out a semiautomatic and blow away the uppity Lexington horsy crowd.) Dreamer also succumbs to that old Disney tendency-the one kids love and parents roll their eyes at-where the children are always smarter than the adults: when Cale isn't outwitting David Morse's bad guy in a bargaining session, she's charming the board of the Breeders' Cup.

Still, the film canters along at its own low-key pace amid the picture-book setting of Kentucky's rolling green pastures. There's a dearth of truly exciting race footage, but then that's not always what makes these horse films work. Instead, we get the far more integral shots of Cale secretly hand-feeding her horse Popsicles-the kind of thing little boys and little girls dream of.