Drama

• Title: The Lucky Ones
• IMDB: link

The film, except for small cameo roles, is a three-man piece.  Two soldiers wounded in action (Rachel McAdams, Michael Peña) with 30-day furloughs and one (Tim Robbins) on his way home for good travel home on the same flight.

Do to circumstances beyond their control the threesome find themselves renting a mini-van and travelling west.

Cheever (Robbins) just wants to make it home to his wife (Molly Hagan) and son (Mark L. Young) in St. Louis.  T.K. (Peña) is on his way to Las Vegas in hopes of curing an unfortunate medical problem caused by his injury.  And Colee (McAdams) is traveling to Vegas to return a friend and fallen soldier’s guitar to his family.

Their journey across the country will lead to surprises and disappointments as the world they fought so hard to get back to has change and dreams they had for their futures turn to ash.

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• Title: Frozen River
• IMDB: link

Melissa Leo stars as Ray, a struggling mother of two (Charlie McDermott, James Reilly) just trying to get by in a small town in upstate New York, just across the border from Quebec.

When her husband takes off for Atlantic City with the final payment for her family’s DoubleWide new home she’s left without options.

A chance encounter with a Native American woman named Lily (Misty Upham) provides Ray a dangerous business opportunity to smuggle illegal immigrants across the Mohawk reservation into the United States.

The film, written and directed by first-timer Courtney Hunt, is a bleak story about love, family, and how far someone will go to persue their dreams.  Leo and Upham carry the film with a pair of strong performances, and when the story movies away from their characters the story suffers.

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• Title: Son of Rambow
• IMDB: link

Son of Rambow is a nice little independent film, quirky and with a good heart.  It’s main problem is it’s not sure just who its audience is.  My main problem is I’m not sure either.  Still, indie film fans should check out the local art houses to see if it’s playing in a theater near you.

The film is built around the meeting and unlikely friendship between the school’s trouble child Lee Carter (Will Poulter) and outsider Will Proudfoot (Bill Milner), a member of the strict religous sect, the Plymouth Brethren.

Although an unlikely pair, the two are brought together by the Lee Carter’s bootleg tape of First Blood which inspires the two to create an entry in a local filmmaking contest for Screen Test featuring the adventures of the son of the famous Rambo.

The story, and the friendship of the pair, is complicated by their vastly different lives and the arrival of a instantly popular foreign exchange student (Jules Sitruk) who brings his own ideas, and his large following, onto the project.

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