Do you know a guy like F.H.? If you do, you probably wish you'd never met him. He's never been able to hold it together, and he has a tendency to screw things up for the people around him. "Does everything you touch turn to s--t?" shouts an exasperated pal at one point. The short answer? Yes. But in the hands of Billy Crudup -- the best of the current crop of young actors making films these days -- F.H. is a character with odd charms and a life story made for telling from a barstool somewhere out west. Samantha Morton, Denis Leary, and Jack Black are also outstanding in this series of vignettes from Denis Johnson's book of the same name.

Tom Nord