Bill Edelstein

Redwood Highway delivers in high spirits and fine thesping what it lacks in dynamic tension and narrative consistency.

Certainly the director’s heart is in the right place here; it’s in moving her pawns around that flummoxes her.

Reset strings together a series of hit-and-miss ideas that never deliver an “aha!” payoff.

The universal theme of personal principle vs. human necessity gets a workout in languid but inexorably powerful morality play, Runoff.

Even in a self-absorbed role, Evans, who also exec produces, manages to be eminently likable, though the narration he’s asked to spew isn’t half as smart as the filmmakers think it is. Monaghan is luminous, and indeed, the actors shake every last bit of believability out of the thin gruel that’s given them.

Jastrow is a longtime helmer of PGA events, and as expert at choosing just the right camera angle for his shots on the course as he is apparently confounded over fashioning believable dialogue or characters.

A fairly predictable yarn that’s lighthearted and well-acted.

While the film’s sense of chronology is at times strained and its tale of redemption hardly unique, its subject is certainly one of a kind.

Engaging performances by the principal players, including Richard Jenkins as a legendary coach beset by personal demons, are almost enough to win the day, but in the end, the cliched narrative is too slight to put the picture over the finish line.

Mixing comedy, drama, satire and noir, the Marvel actor’s second outing behind the camera plays for the same kind of uncomfortable laughs that his 2008 dramedy “Choke” did, but this one gazes so deeply into Hollywood’s navel that, with the affable Gregg in practically every scene, it ultimately can’t escape the whiff of a vanity project.

It’s more of a bawdy buddy movie about the horse’s trainer, Chip Woolley, and owner, Mark Allen (who exec produced), with a bit of slapstick thrown in.

Though the perspective of farmers is well worth examining, this good-looking 77 minutes of propaganda is heavy on sugar-coating and light on nutritional value.

The narrative becomes more tenuous the deeper it strays into drama.

The pacing is tortured. Plot doesn’t so much twist as rupture and spill forth, and character arcs, as if part of a case being built by a cut-rate lawyer, frequently skip discovery and are forgotten before summation.