Parallel plotlines framed inside a machine-gun high-school massacre, unveiling in flashback the events leading up to it as well as jumping ahead fifteen years to reveal the life of a guilty survivor, now a teacher herself at the school, with a husband and daughter at home. Uma Thurman might be acceptable as a later stage of Evan Rachel Wood (blond hair, blue eyes, a nose, a mouth), but acceptance gets tested when we switch continually back and forth between them. And the opening massacre makes the backwards and forwards mundanities more, not less, boring, especially once we’ve been teased with a Sophie’s Choice dilemma in the girls’ restroom and, returning to it time and again, we await and await its result. The trick ending is a revelation of nothing so much as teenage pessimism and perhaps lack of imagination. This trick may well be a legitimate and interesting rhetorical device, but it’s always a bad idea for a movie to save up its interest for the very end. Adapted from a novel by Laura Kasischke; directed by the House of Sand and Fog man, Vadim Perelman; and sharply photographed by Pawel Edelman. (2008) — Duncan Shepherd
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