The Confirmation

Echoes of Vittorio De Sica's 1948 classic Bicycle Thieves can be heard in Bob Nelson's directorial debut, as a young boy accompanies his father on the trail of some stolen carpentry tools. Clive Owen is crumpled and careworn as the divorced dad, and he is more than matched by Jaeden Lieberher, who exudes deadpan precociousness as his eight-year-old son who is spending the weekend while mother Maria Bello and bourgeois stepfather Matthew Modine are attending a church seminar. Though he had no sins to confess prior to his upcoming confirmation, Lieberher discovers that the commandments are tougher to keep out in Owen's blue-collar world. Yet his transgressions are all committed for the best of reasons, as Nelson's movie wittily shows that there's more to being good than keeping to the letter of God's law.