Esther is unfailingly polite, a sensitive painter and pianist, a vision of traditional feminine charm in her prim dresses and bows. But this 9-year-old also has a way with a hammer and a handgun and knows a thing or two about arson and destruction of evidence.

Yes, she’s complicated, the little girl at the center of Orphan, a descendant from a long line of cinematic evil children. Still, despite similarities to predecessors like The Bad Seed’ and The Omen, this well-crafted flick has frights all its own.

Director Jaume Collet-Serra, working from a devilishly clever script by David Leslie Johnson, maintains steady suspense while mercifully mixing in some moments of dark humor. He’s got a strong cast to work with in Vera Farmiga, Peter Sarsgaard and CCH Pounder (Claudette from The Shield), but in young Isabelle Fuhrman, he has a formidable force. Fuhrman, who was just 11 when she shot Orphan, can command the screen with just a sunny smile or a menacing glare. She’s called upon to do some gnarly stuff here and more than rises to the challenge.

Sure, sometimes Esther seems like an impossibly unstoppable killing machine – like a Soviet-era spy in a pint-size body – but seeing how far Orphan will go is part of the fun.

Farmiga and Sarsgaard star as Kate and John, a wealthy Connecticut couple reeling from the stillbirth of their third child. Wanting to give all that love to a child who needs it, they decide to adopt the Russian-born Esther, who’s obviously more than a little different from the other girls at the orphanage. (Pounder plays the nun who arranges the adoption.) Still, that’s much of the allure in their eyes, that she is her own person.

When the couple bring her home, their son, Danny (Jimmy Bennett), immediately feels threatened by her. (He has no idea how right he is.) But their other daughter, Max, takes to her and in no time looks up to her as a big sister. The character is hearing-impaired, as is the actress playing her, Aryana Engineer, who expresses so much emotion by just widening her eyes or scrunching down to hide amid her stuffed animals. She’s adorable, but she’s also crucial to showing us just how rotten Esther truly is.

Soon, accidents start occurring, flare-ups at school and on the playground, and Esther always happens to be around. Kate grows suspicious but John frustratingly fails to believe her, the product of lingering mistrust because of her previous alcoholism and irresponsibility. You want to grab him by the shoulders and shake him, he’s so blind to Esther’s wicked ways, even as the damage worsens.

Then again, Esther’s so sweetly manipulative, she’s hard to resist; in some of the ridiculous moments she shares with John, you don’t know whether to laugh with Orphan or at it.

Farmiga runs and screams and flails a lot – Orphan is reminiscent of 2007’s evil-child thriller Joshua, in which she also starred as a besieged mom – but she also brings believability to Kate’s inner demons, which are so relevant to the way she responds to the increasingly dangerous Esther.

But of course there has to be an explanation for her behavior, and it comes in the form of a twist. You won’t see it coming, but this revelation – and the disturbing images that accompany the climactic chaos Esther causes – will probably leave you with a restless night’s sleep.

Orphan, a Warner Bros. Pictures release, runs 123 minutes. Three stars out of four.

Say what you will about some of Kevin Spacey’s more questionable choices over the past decade, movies like Pay It Forward, K-PAX, The Life of David Gale and his labor-of-love Bobby Darin biopic, Beyond the Sea. When he’s on – when he has strong dialogue to work with and solid actors to play off of – he’s got a presence and a command that are tough to beat.

Shrink allows him to show off one of his strongest sides: He’s sharply verbal but darkly funny. He’s also the central figure in an L.A. story that may seem too familiar, one in which the members of a large ensemble, many of whom are involved in the entertainment industry, all end up being cosmically connected.

The coincidences can get more than a bit contrived. And it’s way too obviously ironic that Spacey’s Dr. Henry Carter, a psychiatrist to Hollywood’s elite, is in desperate need of repair himself.

Among Carter’s mixed-up clientele are a veteran starlet struggling to stay relevant (Saffron Burrows, looking striking as always); an A-list actor who’s an alcoholic sex addict (an uncredited Robin Williams, who shares some sparky banter with Spacey), a high-powered agent (Dallas Roberts) whose obsessive-compulsive disorder is matched only by his mean streak; and a wannabe screenwriter (Mark Webber) who’s a longtime family friend.

Into Carter’s appointment book stumbles a precocious but troubled high school student (Keke Palmer), whom he takes on as a pro bono case. Also on the fringes are the agent’s put-upon and extremely pregnant assistant (Pell James); one of the agent’s clients (Jack Huston), an up-and-coming actor with a substance abuse problem; and the blonde (Laura Ramsey) who sleeps with both men in pursuit of fame.

Yes, these all sound like cliched types, because they are. Still, the characters in Thomas Moffett’s script are intriguing enough, and director Jonas Pate gets sufficiently lively work from his eclectic cast, that you end up caring about them anyway. Los Angeles locations, including hiking trails in the Hollywood Hills and the actual Creative Artists Agency building in Century City, help lend an air of authenticity.

Spacey plays their wayward anchor, waking up each morning in a wine-and-pot-induced stupor, self-medicating all day, then going home, passing out and doing it all over again. (When we first see him, he’s recording the book-on-tape version of his best-seller, Happiness Now, having showered and shaved beforehand with a joint in his mouth.)

He strikes a believable balance between bemusement at his situation and the troubles of the people around him, as well as genuine and justifiable misery, and his therapy sessions provoke a healthy amount of humor and poignancy.

By the end, Carter may not have found true happiness yet – at least Shrink isn’t that painfully obvious – but he’s on his way to achieving some vague sense of peace.

Shrink, a Roadside Attractions release, runs 104 minutes. Two and a half stars out of four.