The United States of Leland

Leland Fitzgerald is sixteen and has stabbed his girlfriend's disabled brother to death. He will not tell anyone why. Pearl Madison, a writer who teaches at the juvenile facility, starts talking to him, meaning first to help and then to get a book out of it. Leland's father is a famous novelist who has taken no interest in his son for years. At the centre is one line: Leland says he can see too much of the sadness in the world and wanted to stop it. The story neither accepts nor refutes this; it watches everyone build their own account, and nobody knows the real reason. Matthew Ryan Hoge wrote and directed, his first feature. Ryan Gosling plays Leland, Don Cheadle plays Pearl and Kevin Spacey the father, with Jena Malone, Chris Klein and Michelle Williams in the cast. The story moves back and forth in time and does not show the killing even at the end, which is the most argued-over choice in it. Who it is for: anyone who likes early-2000s American independent drama and young Gosling. Who it is not for: anyone wanting an answer. The film never supplies the reason, Leland's lines are sometimes too literary, and the subplots dilute the main matter.