The Newton Boys

Not to be hyperbolic, but Richard Linklater's first big-budget movie may be the Jules and Jim of bank-robber movies, thanks to its astonishing handling of period detail and its gentleness of spirit, both buoyed by a gliding lightness of touch.

The Newton Boys is Linklater's most conventional film and, despite its numerous flaws, it's not bad.

Inoffensive and designed to cater to some sort of middle-of-the-road constituency (it's not entirely clear who wants period gangster Westerns to be jolly instead of dark), this film is a huge leap forward for director and cowriter Richard Linklater, and he tackles the genre conventions and period set pieces with eminent grace.

The characters never take hold, and the result feels eerily hollow, like a series of charming improvisational bloopers.

Linklater has less success telling a story; time passes amiably, but the film has no center.

In his true-life film about four brothers who robbed banks out West during the late teens and early '20s, Richard Linklater seems to achieve the impossible: He makes Ethan Hawke bearable.

Scored to a disarmingly quaint array of fiddle-and-banjo tunes, The Newton Boys has so little in the way of blood or rancor that before long, you begin to notice that there's no real drama in it, either.