Apart from Steve Carell, the cast of The Office hasn’t had much luck breaking out as front-and-center movie stars, perhaps because that hit show so resolutely commodifies and reinforces their ordinariness. Alas, A Little Help will not much help transform that track record, even though Jenna Fischer turns in an engaging, pleasantly addled performance as a self-medicating Long Island dental hygienist who must grapple with some serious life changes.

Written and directed by Michael Weithorn, the co-creator of The King of Queens, A Little Help centers around Laura Pehlke (Fischer), whose life gets turned upside down when her possibly philandering husband Bob (Chris O’Donnell) passes away and leaves her on shaky financial footing, further calcifying the emergent remoteness of her chubby 12-year-old son, Dennis (Daniel Yelsky). While a strengthened friendship and possibly more with her brother-in-law Paul (Rob Benedict, above left) develops, Laura also finds herself wrapped up in two lies — one told by Dennis at his new school, that his father was a 9/11 hero, and the other involving a malpractice suit over Bob’s death that Laura knows to be based on false pretenses.

Weithorn’s film aims more for winsome poignance than ha-ha funny, but, flatly, the more dramatic material and particularly the mother-son stuff here doesn’t especially play, in part owing to some performance issues, but also because the stakes are so ill defined. Much more interesting, if only kind of fitfully engaged, are the pressures Laura feels from her snippy mother and sister (Lesley Ann Warren and Brooke Smith, respectively), and the burgeoning relationship between Laura and Paul, an affable, henpecked guy who’s come to feel boxed in by life and his wife. Despite some interesting characters, A Little Help never quite convincingly locates a singular tone or point of focus that would kick it up and make it recommendation-worthy. For an interview with Weithorn, meanwhile, click here. (Freestyle Releasing/Secret Handshake Entertainment, PG-13, 108 minutes)

A debut at last year’s Cannes Film Festival and the closing night gala presentation at the recent Human Rights Watch Film Festival, Oliver Schmitz’s Life, Above All is a well constructed, emotionally rich, issues-oriented drama that unfolds through the perspective of a determined young South African girl. Based on Allan Stratton’s respected novel Chanda’s Secrets, the movie should receive modest embrace in arthouse and specialty markets drawn to foreign films, especially given the gravity and unfortunately enduring topicality of the tough circumstances with which its grown-up-too-soon protagonist grapples.

In a dust-ridden village on the outskirts of Johannesburg, 12-year-old Chanda (Khomotso Manyaka, above, quite good) lives with her mother, Lillian (Lerato Mvelase), and two younger step-siblings. The death of Lillian’s youngest child, a newborn little girl, has stirred up old chaos and addictions. Chanda’s alcoholic stepfather Jonah (Aubrey Poolo) has fallen off the wagon, convinced that Lillian’s breast milk poisoned his “good seed,” and killed their baby. Already distraught and depressed, Lillian becomes sick, and given Jonah’s philandering ways Chanda thinks her mother might have contracted the AIDS virus. When, on the advice of a local shaman, Lillian leaves town without her children, Chanda’s relationship with her helpful but increasingly judgmental neighbor, Mrs. Tafa (Harriet Lenabe), is further complicated by her attempts to intervene in the troubles of her best friend Esther (Keaobaka Makanyane), who has turned to prostitution.

Not entirely unlike Jennifer Lawrence’s character in last year’s critical darling Winter’s Bone, Chanda is forced into a situation whereby she must serve as a caregiver to younger (half-)siblings, while also attempting to modulate difficult circumstances further compounded by adults who have checked out. The narrative here, however, is a bit less bleak and more constructed for a sense of audience-friendly uplift, even given the potentially dark nature of some its subject matter. As the title of its source material might suggest, the film unfolds through Chanda’s perspective, and in this important respect Life, Above All has a guide worth following — sympathetic but untethered to mannered formality.

The story charts a fairly expected path but Schmitz, a South African-born filmmaker of German descent, obviously has a unique connection to the material — a sort of insider’s outside view, one might say — that keeps the movie from tipping over into the maudlin or contrived. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. (Sony Pictures Classics, PG-13, 102 minutes)