Bill Edelstein

With enough fresh stories to keep basketball fanatics engaged and a coda that every soccer mom will appreciate, this is a film that’s worthy of its subject.

Redwood Highway delivers in high spirits and fine thesping what it lacks in dynamic tension and narrative consistency.

Certainly the director’s heart is in the right place here; it’s in moving her pawns around that flummoxes her.

Reset strings together a series of hit-and-miss ideas that never deliver an “aha!” payoff.

The universal theme of personal principle vs. human necessity gets a workout in languid but inexorably powerful morality play, Runoff.

Even in a self-absorbed role, Evans, who also exec produces, manages to be eminently likable, though the narration he’s asked to spew isn’t half as smart as the filmmakers think it is. Monaghan is luminous, and indeed, the actors shake every last bit of believability out of the thin gruel that’s given them.

Jastrow is a longtime helmer of PGA events, and as expert at choosing just the right camera angle for his shots on the course as he is apparently confounded over fashioning believable dialogue or characters.

A fairly predictable yarn that’s lighthearted and well-acted.

While the film’s sense of chronology is at times strained and its tale of redemption hardly unique, its subject is certainly one of a kind.

Engaging performances by the principal players, including Richard Jenkins as a legendary coach beset by personal demons, are almost enough to win the day, but in the end, the cliched narrative is too slight to put the picture over the finish line.