by MARK SLUTSKY

Friday Night Lights

Based on H.G. Bissinger's non-fiction book of the same name, Peter Berg's film follows one season in the life of a Texan high school football team, the Permian Panthers. The Panthers' hometown, Odessa, is a small burg where seemingly everyone is obsessed with the team's performance and the pressure on the players to win is intense and unforgiving.

Friday Night Lights has a post-Soderbergh, vaguely documentary-like feel about it, in both the gritty way it's shot and the way Berg successfully stays away from sports movie clichés. It's an effective approach and the uniformly strong performances really add to it. Billy Bob Thornton plays the coach and the players include Jay Hernandez, Lucas Black and Derek Luke (Antwone Fisher), who is just fantastic as hot-shot "Boobie" Miles. You really feel the impact every up and down, every win and loss, every injured player, has on the township, which is presumably economically depressed, though Berg never gets too melodramatic about it.

With the football stadium looming over Odessa like a castle, the town is pretty much a character in its own right and the movie itself has a beautiful sense of the wide-open empty Texas space. While a little more playing dynamics on the field itself would've really helped, this is still the best sports film to come along in ages - realistic-feeling and unsentimental. (MS)

Rosenstrasse

Prompted by her father's recent passing and her mother's consequent new-found faith in Judaism, New Yorker Hannah (Maria Schrader) puts her life on hold and heads to her parents' native Germany to find out how her then eight-year-old mother survived the Holocaust. She tracks down Lena, an elderly lady who knew of Hannah's mother. They had met on Rosenstrasse, a street in Berlin where, in 1943, thousands of Aryans, mostly women, camped out as they waited for the release of their detained Jewish spouses. Day after day, these wives kept a vigilant watch on the detention centre in the hopes of getting one last glimpse before their husbands were deported to concentration camps. When it seemed that Germany would lose to the Allies, women like Lena did whatever they could to stall the Third Reich transporters until the war was over.

Based on a true story, Rosenstrasse is in and of itself a compelling narrative. But director Margarethe von Trotta weaves together a series of flashbacks to develop an understated suspense that draws you in even further. Katja Riemann, who won best actress at the Venice Film Festival for her portrayal of the young Lena, combines stoicism and fragility. Her performance is especially powerful in the scene where her husband briefly appears in the window of the prison and she savours every second of her fleeting moment of hope. Suffice to say, this quiet drama is not a light film. But it's also not overly maudlin and, considering the severity of the subject matter, that's no easy feat. (SR)

Raise Your Voice

Hilary Duff's latest star vehicle is everything the future mallrats of America need to know about teen movie stereotypes. Duff's character Terri, a small town underdog in the form of a lume-blond songbird with an infectious smile, is accepted into an elite music program in L.A. The only problem is her father (overly protective guardian who means well) doesn't want her to go. So she and her aunt (only person who understands her and is willing to stand up to her dad) invent an elaborate lie about where she's really spending her summer.

And so begins her new life in the City of Angels. Enter her love interest, a smart-ass guitarist with spiked dyed hair (he's punk rock). Then she tries to befriend an anti-social pianist who wears all black (she's goth). Her roommate is a sassy electric violinist who doesn't have time to make friends because she has to win the school contest; it's her only way out of the ghetto (misunderstood minority with a heart of gold). John Corbett plays her music teacher who wears leather pants and plays stand-up bass like he's a rock star (he's unorthodox, yet sweet young Terri will learn more from him about life than from all the textbooks in the world.)

In one particularly touching scene, he advises her to incorporate her pain into her art just like Billie Holiday and Patsy Cline. Thanks. I've been wondering who Duff's pinched munchkin voice reminded me of. How could I have missed it? This film is for 12 and under. (SR)

Les Choristes

This remake of the 1945 Jean Dréville film La Cage aux rossignols was seen by more than seven million moviegoers in France, making it the biggest French hit of the year. It's no surprise: rarely have I seen a film as drenched in so much good sentiment as this. I kept expecting that any given minute, puppies and rainbows would burst out of the screen.

Les Choristes takes place in the Fond de l'étang boarding school, where rowdy problem kids only know strict discipline and harsh punishment. That is until Clément Mathieu (Gérard Jugnot), a failed musician, is hired as their new supervisor. The warm and compassionate bald man will bring music into their lives, turning these rotten apples into happy little choirboys.

This is basically School of Rock for grandmothers, a feel-good melodrama full of gentle humour, broad sweeping sentimentality and cutesy kids with heavenly voices. The numerous songs performed by the choir, most of them composed specifically for the film, are pleasant enough. However, the thin story built around them is forgettable. You have your conflict with the grumpy principal, your hint of romance between Mathieu and the mother of one of the students and a few other subplots that are really just filler until the next musical number.

Despite a predictable script, Jugnot is still able to play an immensely sympathetic character without being cloying. Whereas writer-director Christophe Barratier has apparently never met a cliché he didn't love. Les Choristes isn't great cinema, but it is certainly a crowd-pleaser. (KL)

Friday Night Lights, Les Choristes, Rosenstrasse and Raise Your Voice open Friday, Oct. 8

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