Transamerica

It's rare that a movie combines such a truly terrific performance with such a range of hoary script clichés. Huffman plays Bree, a pre-op male-to-female transsexual. Just a week before the final surgery, Bree discovers that she fathered a son, who is now 17 and in jail for hustling. Bree's shrink refuses to okay the surgery until she has dealt with this revelation.

So Bree flies from L.A. to New York to bail out the boy (Zegers) by pretending to be a church lady, then she takes him on a road trip back to L.A. Along the way, they bicker and bond, meet a wise Native American and learn a little bit about themselves.

No one could criticize Tucker's deep understanding of the world of transsexuals. And Huffman is utterly convincing as a man working hard to become a woman: She holds her voice carefully in an androgynous range and walks with a precise birdlike gait, as though constantly on guard against any hint of her old gender. But all her good work is undermined by Tucker's reliance on the same old formulas. If we tell you that the two end up at Bree's home, do we need to tell you that her mom (Flanagan) is an intolerant grotesque? Didn't think so.—Hank Sartin