Trucker is a knockout.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Oct 23, 2009

Features spectacular performances but these excellent actors are required to do too much heavy lifting with a script that plays out too predictably to be effective.

| Oct 21, 2009

You know exactly what is going to happen and you don't really care.

Full Review | Oct 19, 2009

Most of Trucker comes off like a sincere but totally artificial slice of life.

Full Review | Oct 19, 2009

There are so many wonderfully unconventional things to like about this tiny independent film, Monaghan's earthy and uncompromising performance chief among them, its depth surprising you at every turn.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Oct 16, 2009

Monaghan, so good in Gone Baby Gone, mopes self-consciously through the role of Diane, a loner who finds her heart when she's thrown together with her estranged 11-year-old son (Jimmy Bennett), whom she takes on the road. Yes, it's one of those movies.

| Original Score: D | Oct 14, 2009

Monaghan gets how people with honky-tonk souls move in mysterious ways.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Oct 9, 2009

Michelle Monaghan delivers the goods.

Full Review | Oct 9, 2009

The vehicle (if you will pardon the pun) doesn't quite know what to do with her character. And so the movie, the first feature written and directed by James Mottern, turns into a conventional mother-child reunion drama.

Full Review | Original Score: 2.5/5 | Oct 9, 2009

Monaghan does a reasonably good job with a formulaic script that calls for her to become prettier and more feminine as she learns to be a mama bear to her smart-mouthed but ultimately adorable kid.

| Original Score: 2/4 | Oct 9, 2009

| Original Score: 3/5 | Oct 9, 2009

I concede the story arc is fairly predictable, assuming neither one murders the other. But Mottern and his actors take no hostages.

| Original Score: 4/4 | Oct 8, 2009

Were it not for Michelle Monaghan's convincingly dirt-under-the-fingernails performance in the title role, there would be absolutely nothing about the film to distinguish it from dozens of other movies.

| Original Score: 2/5 | Oct 7, 2009

In his tough-minded commitment to both his characters and to their lower-middle-class milieu, the filmmaker recasts his potentially disastrous material into something that feels emotionally honest, if not exactly revelatory.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Oct 7, 2009

As the camera perches high on a hill at dawn, Diane's truck sneaking out of town, you sense the Demme-esque working-class comedy that might have been.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Oct 7, 2009

Thanks to sensitive direction and a natural, exemplary script, both of which by the talented and never syrupy James Mottern, Trucker holds its emotions firmly in check throughout.

Full Review | Oct 7, 2009

There may as well be a road sign announcing Diane's transformation from reckless loner to diligent mother, but it's a smooth ride thanks to Monaghan, and an impressive ensemble.

| Oct 6, 2009

What's missing from the payload is surprise.

Full Review | Jun 10, 2008