One need not be a horse enthusiast to appreciate Cindy Meehl‘s richly textured Buck, a profound and moving portrait of channeling misfortune into something positive, and far and away one of the best documentaries of 2011.

Horses are majestic creatures, but known to have their own personalities, which often leads to training practices predicated on harsh punishments. Soft-spoken, middle-aged Buck Brannaman (above), who travels the country more than eight months a year giving clinics to horse owners, preaches compassion and respect, and in doing so underscores how the animal-human relationship is in many ways a metaphor for the challenges of self-betterment, and life itself.

Part of the inspiration for both Robert Redford’s
1998 film The Horse Whisperer, as well as the novel upon which it is based, the
quietly charismatic Brannaman is an endlessly engaging and paradoxical figure — a figure who shuns the sort of attention he naturally draws forth. The delicate illumination of his incredible gift and way with horses is fascinating in and of itself, but Meehl shades her movie with plenty of Brannaman’s personal story, which includes the death of his birth mother and a terribly abusive early childhood. The love of his incredible foster parents, including the wry aphorisms of his mother Shirley (“Blessed are the flexible, for they don’t get bent out of shape”), seem to have penetrated a protective veneer all the way to Brannaman’s core, and serve as a powerful example of the roles that adult care, choice and focus play in overcoming fundamental disadvantages. The feelings Buck elicits linger with one long after viewing. It’s a deeply humanistic film, rendered with grace, compassion and an unfussy aptitude. For an interview with Meehl, click here. (Sundance Select, unrated, 88 minutes)

A lot of Hollywood romantic comedies unfold in worlds that are virtually unrecognizable from the real one, where couples meet in strange fashion and relationships often overlap in messy ways. Writer-director J.C. Khoury’s engaging The Pill, which just enjoyed its world premiere at the 14th annual Dances With Films festival, is thankfully not one of those efforts.

The movie centers around Fred (Noah Bean, Rose Byrne’s murdered fiancé on Damages), a New Yorker who hooks up with the free-spirited Mindy (Rachel Boston, above right), has pleasantly drunken but unfortunately unprotected sex, wakes up, and then spends a madcap day trying to avoid his girlfriend Nelly (Anna Chlumsky) and stick to his one-night stand, in order to make sure she takes the two-installment morning-after pill that will help prevent an unwanted pregnancy. Claiming first that she “knows her body,” and later that the birth control pill is against her religious beliefs (“the one with the Pope”), Mindy is a grab-bag of resistance and whirling dervish energy, keeping Fred on his heels and making his quest mainly a furtive one, under the guise of striking up a more serious relationship. Dragged to a family party, Fred gets to meet Mindy’s parents (Jean Brassard and Lue McWilliams), as well as her engaged younger sister Rose (Gossip Girl‘s Dreama Walker), and ex-boyfriend Jim (Al Thompson). Slowly, Fred finds himself more attracted to Mindy in unexpected ways, complicating his problematic and possibly flickering relationship with Nelly.

The Pill‘s compressed timeline, and its conflict with New York City’s geographical realities, offers some opportunity for pin-prick critical deflation, but there’s a pleasant, forward-leaning energy to the entire film that mitigates this. This isn’t gritty and wildly insightful, or reinventing the wheel, but Khoury is honest about the varied and jumbled emotions of his characters, and lets them make/have made some dubious choices without judging them or bending over backwards to try to explain and justify everything. The Pill is reflective of the realities of the twenty- and even early-thirtysomething dating scene, in which people mean well but often find their attempts at monogamy tested in unexpected ways. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. (Shoot First Entertainment, unrated, 83 minutes)

An achingly sincere (and achingly familiar), Seattle-set drama of parental bereavement and relationship drift, writer-director Joseph Mitacek’s Morning, which just screened as part of the recently concluded 14th annual Dances With Films festival, is proof that there’s quiet, to-scale reward in plenty of indie cinema, if predominantly for those who don’t mind its gaping, laid-track similarity to so much heartstring-tugging Hollywood studio product.

Morning centers around Michael (Andrew Ramaglia) and Sarah Hade (Emily Cline), a married couple with a two-year-old son, and all of the typical sorts of challenges that come with trying to juggle both home and work. Sarah is going back to school and closing in on a degree, while Michael works on a fishing crew that’s seen better days. His stresses inform a certain boozy detachment and isolation, which in turn further calcifies Sarah’s resentments. Things take a turn for the tragic when Michael falls asleep while babysitting one evening, and their son drowns. Sarah, while understandably grief-stricken, is also additionally racked with a complementary sense of guilt since she stayed out for a drink that night with an old college boyfriend, Alan (Ryan Cooper). In this grey aftermath, the couple struggles with how, and whether, to say together.

Bluntly, Morning is the sort of film that could carve out a certain niche in the commercial marketplace if it had big stars or recognizable faces attached, but as rendered stands virtually no chance of doing so. There’s a legitimately melancholic soul to the movie that holds one’s attention in they’re feeling more or less sympathetic going in. And Ramaglia and particularly Cline offer up game performances. But, beat by beat, almost all of Morning’s arguments and scenes of dramatic intensity feel nipped from some well-worn screenwriter’s playbook of heightened stakes rather than flowing honestly from the characters.

Additionally, Mitacek handles these and other dramatic turns — including the movie’s big battle-to-save-their-drowned-son sequence — so artlessly that the contrivance of each bit is highlighted instead of being smoothly under-stitched. Rather than try to underplay things and get at the root of Michael and Sarah’s personal devastations, and how they overlap but are also different, Mitacek instead repeatedly comes up with ways to foist and inject puffed-up drama into the proceedings — grabs at audience attention that come across as needlessly showy. Loss and terrible pain visits all of us at certain times in our lives, but that doesn’t mean that all movies that try to merely hold up a mirror to that loss are created equal. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. (St. Andrews Films, unrated, 86 minutes)