The adaptation of a nongenre novel by John Burnham Schwartz bears a first-glance resemblance to the Claude Chabrol thriller ca. 1970, This Man Must Die, in both of which a bereaved father tracks down the hit-and-run killer of his young son. But Chabrol's killer, from a genre novel by Nicholas Blake (a/k/a Cecil Day-Lewis, Poet Laureate of England, father of Daniel Day-Lewis), was as loutish and loathsome as any avenger could wish, while the killer here, a father of a young boy himself, is racked by conscience and beckoned by confession. Terry George's film, his first after Hotel Rwanda, ends up bearing a resemblance to more recent Chabrol films in its reluctance, if not outright refusal, to function as a thriller, drifting instead into the realm of the weepie, with a suitably damp cast: Joaquin Phoenix, Mark Ruffalo, the spectrally beautiful Jennifer Connelly. (Antoni Corone stays admirably dry as the policeman in charge of the case.) The converging-paths narrative design, both before and after the accident, is a tad heavy-handed, but in so small a New England town it doesn't take long for the paths to converge: when the obsessed father hires a lawyer to ride the police, the lawyer is none other than the killer, now in a unique position to keep tabs on the investigation. (His ex-wife, for extra measure, was the victim's music teacher.) After that, the main source of suspense is the question of how close to the top, or how far over it, the emoting will go. With Mira Sorvino, Elle Fanning. (2007) — Duncan Shepherd