Bobby:  There are about a billion characters in this picture about the last day of Robert F. Kennedy, but not one of them is Bobby himself (or Ethel, but nobody cares about her).  That's because Bobby is about the support staff at the Ambassador Hotel on June 5, 1968.  There are 23 major characters, which initially comes off as complete overkill, but writer-director Emilio Estevez's brilliantly edited finale manages to pull them all together in a way that only made me think that only a few of them could have been abandoned.

The Ambassador was called "A city within the city," complete with a diner, a salon, a chapel, and an opulent lobby in which a guy could just sit around and play chess all day.  That's where Estevez is able to cull so many characters from (they're all fictional, in case you were wondering).  For me, the fun part with a cast this large is finding connections between the acting talent.  And there are a ton of examples in Bobby.  There's Apocalypse Now's Martin Sheen and Laurence Fishburne, and there's Estevez and Demi Moore, who starred in two films (Wisdom and St. Elmo's Fire) over 20 years ago.  There's Boogie Nights' William H. Macy and Heather Graham, and there are even a few real life connections of the obvious (Estevez/Sheen and Moore/Ashton Kutcher) and the less obvious (Moore and Sharon Stone share a touching scene where they realize they're a pair of scary cougars who once played strippers in high-profile flops).

At nearly two hours, Bobby could definitely use some trimming (the Kutcher thread comes immediately to mind).  At times, it was cloying, but at other times, quite emotional, especially when Estevez draws less-than-subtle parallels between 1968 and 2006.

Away from Her:  Toronto native Sarah Polley, making her feature directorial debut, does well just to not let Her devolve into a Canadian version of The Notebook.  Both films are about an elderly woman with dementia who is placed in a home while the man who loves her desperately clings ]to the memories they shared in the past.  It was Fiona's (Julie Christie) idea to move into a nursing home because of her failing memory, and husband Grant (Gordon Pinsent) was reluctant even before he heard about the facilities policy of allowing no visitors for the initial 30 days.  When Grant visits Fiona for the first time, it's clear she's developed an attachment to another patient (Michael Murphy).  Grant is heartbroken, but continues to visit.

Polley, who has made a handful of shorts, shows a remarkable assured hand for someone her age, but it's her adaptation of Alice Munro's short story that impressed me the most.  Another example of an actor moving behind the camera and getting superb performances from his/her cast.

Jindabyne:  If somebody told you a 24-page short story had been stretched into a 123-minute film, you'd slap them and call them a heretic.  But that's just what happens to Raymond Carver's So Much Water So Close to Home under the mitts of debut screenwriter Beatrix Christian and director Ray Lawrence (Lantana).  Carver's story has already been used, and used much more concisely as one of the stories in Robert Altman's Short Cuts, with Anne Archer and Fred Ward playing the battling couple.

In Jindabyne, Archer and Ward are replaced with Gabriel Byrne and Laura Linney (does that make this a prequel to p.s., or to A Simple Twist of Fate?), parents to a single child in the eponymous Australian village.  When Byrne's Stewart and his buddies go out on a fishing trip, they stumble on the corpse of a woman floating the river.  Since they're in the middle of nowhere, and she's already dead, they tether the body to a tree and carry on with their fishing for a few days.

As you might think, this doesn't go over really well when Stewart and company return home.  The twist to Carver's story is that the dead girl is Aboriginal, which adds a dangerous racial angle to the incident.  Jindabyne could have lost the unsettled bits about the death-obsessed children to cut down on the running time, but it's still full of strong performances.