Patricia Riggen’s illegal-immigrant ordeal is a virtual heart-tugging machine, tugging on it at regular and frequent intervals, so that you learn, like an experimental rat, to cringe in anticipation. The agony begins immediately. A camera-friendly single mom (Kate del Castillo) in East L.A., making her weekly payphone call to her south-of-the-border son (Adrian Alonso) on his ninth birthday, turns on the waterworks when he reminds her he hasn’t seen her in four years. At the birthday party immediately thereafter, Granny is hacking her way to an imminent grave, and a distant uncle, brother of the absent father, drops by to volunteer for guardianship, fully cognizant of the $300 per month sent home by the mother. Granny, like clockwork, fails to wake up, and the boy, wasting only a little time for waterworks, heads north on his own to track down his mother before the next weekly call. Hair-raising adventures and close shaves follow bumper to bumper, though the boy always appears to have time to comb his hair as neatly as if he were sitting for a studio portrait. A happy ending never feels in doubt. It’s only a question of how many tugs. (2008) — Duncan Shepherd
This movie is not currently in theaters.