Maria Full of Grace
When a movie can blend passionate social concern with good old-fashioned suspense, it must be doing something right.Maria Full of Gracescores high on both counts. Maria is a Colombian teenager who, for a large paycheck, agrees to be a mule for drug-runners:  she has to swallow dozens of thumb-sized capsules of heroin and smuggle them into New York. This debilitating process is painstakingly described, and of course not everything goes as planned when Maria and her fellow mules land in America. Director Joshua Marston is working on a low budget, which explains the film's narrow, single-minded focus--but this may be a strength, not a weakness. The trump card is the lead performance of Catalina Sandrino Moreno, who won awards at the Seattle and Newport Film Festivals. Her empathetic face carries us along on Maria's journey, and humanizes a problem that is too easily relegated to a headline.--Robert Horton