Stealing Home

This 1988 film opens with a phone call. Billy, a former baseball player, learns from his mother that Katie, the person closest to him in his youth, has died, and that he is being asked to decide what to do with her ashes. He goes home, and the film moves between present and past to tell what she was to him: first the young woman who looked after him, then his first love, always a few steps ahead of him. Its interest is not in baseball but in how long one person's effect on another lasts. Jodie Foster's Katie appears in limited scenes yet carries the film's whole weight, and the character's depression and her end are handled with a directness unusual for the cinema of the period. The telling leans toward nostalgia and softens too much at times. Who it's for: viewers who like the emotional American drama of the eighties. Who it's not for: anyone who would rather not approach the subject of suicide, or who will find the nostalgic register heavy.