Written by the selfsame Antwone Fisher, in recollection of the time in his life when he was (by this account) a bottled-up, cork-blowing sailor who, through the solicitude of a nice girl and a Navy psychiatrist ("I love you, son"), confronted and conquered his inner turmoil over his abandonment by his mother and his abuse by his foster family ("I'm still standing! I'm still strong!"). Also the directorial debut of Denzel Washington, one of the most magnetic figures on the contemporary American screen. Somehow the magnetism does not come through as strongly from the other side of it. A dream scene, surely, is a bad way to begin a directing career, especially when the dream is a pastoral idyll of a little black boy introduced to his smiling ancestors and a stack of flapjacks. Nor does it seem a very smart strategy for the uplifting climax of the debut to be the literal Dream Come True. Not uncommonly for an actor turned director, Washington gives plenty of TLC to his cast -- newcomer Derek Luke in the title role, Joy Bryant, Salli Richardson, Novella Nelson, Viola Davis, and Washington himself as the psychiatrist -- although he presses up so close to the faces as to leave suffocatingly little space and air around them. Luke, who gamely holds his own opposite The Magnet, runs the full, back-and-forth, lung-bursting gamut of emotions; and the happy face at one end of them certainly, and touchingly, looks like a goal worth fighting for. (2002) — Duncan Shepherd