Box of Moonlight
John Turturro plays a humorless engineer who uncharacteristically takes a brief break from his life to find the source of his only happy childhood memory. When that fails to materialize, he offers a ride to a benign, buckskin-attired kook (Sam Rockwell) and soon gets much deeper into the young fellow's unhinged life than he ever intended. Director Tom DiCillo (Living in Oblivion) makes a good case that Turturro's character is getting what he needs (a lot of loosening up) versus what he wants (everything on his terms). Ironically, the film can't make the same claim, tightly bound as it is to conventional and rather bland storytelling form. One keeps wanting something cinematically thrilling to happen, but the project is too rigid for that. Having said that, however, even if this isn't a great film, it is an awfully pleasant one. With Catherine Keener, Lisa Blount, and a cameo by Dermot Mulroney.--Tom Keogh