Reservation Road (15)

Oscar-feted for Hotel Rwanda, writer/director Terry George returns with an A-list cast and an inflated sense of his own importance in this angsty, overwrought fam-dram. At first it’s a shock to discover Reservation Road is straight-to-DVD, but get past the appearance of Joaquin Phoenix as a grieving father, and Mark Ruffalo as the lawyer who ran over his kid, and you’re left with a TV movie with pretensions. The set-up is overly schematic, the acting OTT, the result miserable and obvious. Deleted scenes and a worthy featurette do little to compensate. A crying shame.

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