Amazing Grace

dir. Michael Apted

A sweeping weepie about the salutary influence of Christianity on 19th-century British politics, Amazing Grace (directed by Michael Apted) arrives in American waters showing somewhat suspicious colors. Produced by the Bristol Bay Productions (formerly known as Crusader Entertainment and owned by Christian oilman Philip Anschutz, who also owns Walden Media, which produces The Chronicles of Narnia and other family fare), the movie seeks to tell a perfectly legitimate story: how one savvy and deeply moral member of the British House of Commons sought to halt the British slave trade, and eventually succeeded. But the film's primary message is that even boring people can be good.

The central conflict in the life of William Wilberforce (Ioan Gruffudd) is whether to fight the good fight as a politician, or to retire to a rarefied life of contemplation and prayer in the Church of England. He is also sickly, and a terrible workaholic. Note to screenwriters: A pale pallor and a quaint morphine addiction do not a memorable character make. Even in the film's most rousing passages (and there are many rousing passages), Gruffudd never claws his way out of ceramic sainthood. The supporting cast picks up some of the slack. The awesomely weird (and awesomely named) Benedict Cumberbatch plays Wilberforce's friend, Prime Minister William Pitt the Younger, who wheels and deals when Wilberforce won't get his hands dirty. Romola Garai (Vanity Fair) injects some credible vivacity into the underwritten role of Wilberforce's future wife.

Perhaps defensively, Amazing Grace also goes out of its way to demonstrate the deeply uncool personalities at the heart of the abolitionist movement. There's a sweaty, wild-eyed guy (Rufus Sewell as Thomas Clarkson, the influential writer and pamphleteer), a stodgy lady (Georgie Glen as Hannah More), and other assorted religious weirdoes. Their bickering may be historically accurate, but listening to it is the opposite of being entertained, and you quickly become impatient for the bewigged Parliamentarians to get around to their grandiloquent debates and petty procedural moves. The film seems to be arguing that Christians may be homely and socially retarded, but at least they were right about the moral questions of their time. (Two hundred years ago.) ANNIE WAGNER

The Astronaut Farmer

dir. Michael Polish

On a pure hokum level, The Astronaut Farmer more than delivers. It's cheerily patriotic, overly earnest, and willfully untethered to reality—a modern-day fairy tale, complete with a redemptive third-act finale. Unfortunately, that finale is so ludicrous, and the overall effort so pedestrian, that it brings the entire enterprise crashing down.

Billy Bob Thornton plays a farmer named (this is going to sting) Charles Farmer, who years ago was forced to abandon his dreams of being an astronaut in order to rescue his family's acreage from foreclosure. Now happily married and the father of two, Farmer spends his every free moment chasing his longtime dream of making it into space. Which means building his own Apollo-mission-style rocket in the family barn—a plan that goes smoothly (if preposterously) until he runs afoul of the USA PATRIOT Act while searching for rocket fuel.

From here, genre trappings dictate the direction of the rest of the story, little of which is surprising. But what is surprising is how director Michael Polish (Twin Falls Idaho) and his coscreenwriter, brother Mark Polish, are so eager to follow every prestamped step along the way. Farmer decries government interference ("No one owns space!" or some such blather), his family's well-being is threatened, and a personal catastrophe is overcome—all by the numbers, and all so that the requisite triumphant finale can be reached in a reasonable running time. That said triumph is also a rushed bit of hogwash doesn't help matters any. If The Astronaut Farmer had been "inspired by true events," it might have had some emotional impact. Standing as a pure product of the imagination, however, it's not nearly imaginative enough.BRADLEY STEINBACHER

Our Daily Bread

dir. Nikolaus Geyrhalter

A look at the way plants and animals are grown and plucked or killed for human use, Our Daily Bread is an austere, narrationless, almost lulling film—a novel approach for a subject so heavily worked over by American productions like the agitdoc The Future of Food and the recent narrative flop Fast Food Nation. The factory farms in Our Daily Bread are located in Austria, and it's hard to know what to think about the images you're seeing. As you watch a worker moving slowly down the marked lanes in a vast barn, systematically scattering baby chicks so she can scoop out any dead bodies, you have to wonder: Is it worse in the U.S.? Better? Do the line workers stunning and slaughtering cattle have to work more quickly and therefore dangerously? These are factories whose owners gave permission to be filmed, after all; they must think they're running a pretty clean operation.

Nothing in the film is particularly shocking. Instead, the overall mood is one of mystery and estrangement. Cabbages are harvested at night, by the weird light of a low, rolling device that also collects vegetables as they're bagged and boxed. In the greatest shot, a structure shaped like an enormous bird spreads its wings and seems to crouch as—it's hard to see in the dusky light—it sprays chemicals, perhaps, on the fields below. You probably already feel as though you're disconnected from the soil that gives rise to your food. What Our Daily Bread will teach you is that your food—vines rising from long plastic bags of dirt, forming parallel lines on white greenhouse floors—feels estranged from its soil too. ANNIE WAGNER