An intriguing query that’s often posed in Christian circles – What if Jesus came back today? – gets a toothless dramatization in this independent feature. Tony Goldwyn stars as a drifter (and carpenter, natch) who rejuvenates the spiritual life of a small town in a variety of hokey ways. The production values and performances are

“…takes a tragic real-life story and forces it into the shape of a thesis statement.”

The acting is as good as you’ve heard – Oscar winner Halle Berry pulls off way more than a makeup-free publicity stunt – but this somber drama detailing the cautious romance between a white prison guard (Billy Bob Thornton) and a black waitress throws too many tragedies at its characters’ feet. For every real emotion

This earnest but silly saga about a Mormon missionary sent to the remote island kingdom of Tonga in the 1950s consists of a series of crises (a child missing during a hurricane, alcoholism) that the evangelist manages to neatly solve within 10 minutes each. We learn little about either the island culture or the Mormon

The ruthless, aspiring class president Reese Witherspoon played in 1999’s Election could be a descendant of Becky Sharp, the conniving centerpiece of Vanity Fair, William Makepeace Thackeray’s 1848 expose of Victorian high society. Which gives Witherspoon another chance to exhibit the mischievous edge that juts out now and then like her javelin of a chin.

This teen flick turns an Outside magazine article about female surfers into something like MTV’s The Real World in Hawaii. False, forced drama – primarily the heroine’s (Kate Bosworth) unlikely jitters about an approaching surfing competition – take precedence over any real sense of this sports subculture. Even the action shots, edited with the rabid

Mandy Moore’s teen melodrama features a birth, a death, a funeral and a wedding, yet it handles such swooning material with something that can almost be called tact. Add the star’s willingness to play a teen with a brain and you get enough genuine moments to make the soap-opera tendencies forgivable.

Nothing new for writer-director Terrence Malick (Badlands, The Thin Red Line), whose pet subject – mankind’s despoiling of an Edenic setting – is here transferred to the legend of John Smith (Colin Farrell) and Pocahontas (Q’Orianka Kilcher). The tale may be perfectly suited to Malick’s languorous cinematography and portentous voice-over narration, but by now these

Winner of 2006’s Best Foreign Film Oscar, this thug-rehabilitation movie goes to exaggerated lengths to redeem its criminal antihero. Presley Chweneyagae gives a riveting performance as a thieving teen who steals a woman’s car without realizing her baby is in the back seat. A crisis of conscience ensues, as well as a crash course in