Anna Paquin, who gave a great kid’s performance in The Piano, offers a great adolescent performance as Lisa. Bright, snarky, spoiled, and neurotic about her broken family in New York, she drives her decent mom (J. Smith-Cameron) nearly crazy by becoming a drama diva. The cause is her role in the accidental death of a woman in a bus accident. She covers up, then pops open in a way that shakes every moral and emotional berry on the guilt tree. Director and writer Kenneth Lonergan poaches on Woody Allen’s turf and crams in too many diffuse themes, but his terrific cast (Allison Janney, Matt Damon, Jeannie Berlin, Mark Ruffalo, Matt Broderick) rises almost to Paquin’s sustained, scary, movingly exposed level. (2011) — David Elliott
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