The Rising Place

As earnest as its artless young characters, Tom Rice's intermittently affecting debut walks a well-trod path without finding anything very new.

This cliché-filled labor of love is staffed with some fine performers - Jennifer Holliday sings at a juke joint and Frances Sternhagen plays an older version of Emily's sister.

Deeply felt but flat and unimaginative.

Broadway dreamgirl Jennifer Holliday's musical interludes occasionally relieve this mélange of recycled social morality lessons.

Sticky sweet sentimentality, clumsy plotting and a rosily myopic view of life in the WWII-era Mississippi Delta undermine this adaptation of an unpublished novel by David Armstrong.

An ultra-touchy-feely race-relations, civil-rights drama as imagined by theme-park organizers, with every character painted in broad strokes in a story that eagerly tugs at every available heartstring -- and rings false at every turn.

This misty-eyed Southern nostalgia piece, in treading the line between sappy and sanguine, winds up mired in tear-drenched quicksand.