Skins

This is a film about anger, shame and helplessness, and it offers no answers, merely hard questions and angry challenges.

Graham Greene ("Dances With Wolves") in one of the year's best performances, he's a fully dimensional character: pathetic and shrewd, tragic and bitterly funny.

Serious stuff indeed, but the film is also rich with humor -- most of it courtesy of the always-excellent Greene -- and ends with an act of vandalism as shocking as it is exhilarating.

This first generation of Native American movie directors has already managed to make great strides: While prodding the collective conscience of the U.S. mainstream with their disturbing views of the reservation, they have also opened the door to a vibrant spirit world unknown to all but a few.

The sharpness of Eyre's opening, however, ebbs away when he takes up the story of Rudy (Eric Schweig) and Mogie (Graham Greene), two brothers with neatly opposed responses to the reservation grind.

Might have been better off as a documentary, with less of Mr. Eyre's uninspired dramatics and more of his sense of observation and outrage.

Good intentions or not, ineptitude and cloying sentimentality don't do anybody any favors.