“Swing Vote” is yet another hosanna to Americana, like 1997′s “The Postman” directed by Kevin Costner. Once again, Costner stars as a downscale everyman who upgrades to the great helmsman. Here he plays Bud, an alcoholic single dad laid off from his job at an egg packaging plant in New Mexico. Due to an accidentally unplugged voting machine, a vote in his name did count. And the outcome of the presidential election is undecided until he recasts his vote in ten days, the time frame of the screenplay by Joshua Michael Stern & Jason Richman. Joshua Michael Stern directs an ensemble cast stocked with news personalities, including Campbell Brown, James Carville, Mary Hart, Arianna Huffington, Bill Maher and Chris Matthews. The Republican incumbent (Kelsey Grammer) and the Democratic candidate (Dennis Hopper) come to town to woo the ultimate swing-voter. Tom Petty and Willie Nelson make cameos at the behest of the two contenders. The two campaign managers, played by Nathan Lane and Stanley Tucci, are stock types, but their quickie campaign ads to appeal to Bud’s supposed issues are brilliantly cynical. There’s scant political context in this public-service announcement: JFK is the most recent president mentioned, and there’s no trace of 9/11, Iraq or Afghanistan. “If America has a true enemy, I guess it’s me,” Bud confesses on national TV, when acknowledging a dereliction of civic duty. Madeline Carroll plays Bud’s take-charge 12-year-old daughter Molly, the single most wise, decent, competent, empowered character in the entire film. With a better wardrobe, she’d be a candidate for an American Girl doll. With Paula Patton, Judge Reinhold, George Lopez and Mare Winningham. 119m. (Bill Stamets)

Canadian director Patricia Rozema (“When Night Is Falling,” “I’ve Heard the Mermaids Singing”), South African-born screenwriter Ann Peacock (“The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch & the Wardrobe”) and Abigail Breslin, America’s indie sweetheart from “Nim’s Island” and “Little Miss Sunshine,” together create a genuinely wholesome adventure set in 1934. Breslin is the title Kit, a 9-year-old hoping to write for the Cincinnati Register. Before getting her first byline and penny-a-word payday, she will crack a string of thefts blamed on the unemployed. The messages are girl-empowering and hobo-embracing. “Not all hoboes are the same,” Kit observes. Her character is based on a doll born and branded to enhance female esteem: “American Girl celebrates a girl’s inner star—that little whisper inside that encourages her to stand tall, reach high and dream big.” When her car salesman dad (Chris O’Donnell) loses his job and his car, he heads to Chicago to look for work. Her mother (Julia Ormond) takes in boarders, sells eggs and sews feedsack dresses. Valerie Tripp’s 2000 book “Meet Kit,” the first in a series supplying Kit’s backstory, simplifies the Depression in 1934: “About three years ago people got nervous about their money and stopped buying as many things as they used to.” Thankfully, there’s only a whisper of corporate ka-ching on screen, although American Girl thoughtfully offers a $22 model of Kit’s typewriter “that ‘dings’ just like the real thing when she gets to the end of a line.” Kids take note: Kit reads and writes, and never plays with dolls or goes to the picture show. With Wallace Shawn, Stanley Tucci, Jane Krakowski, Joan Cusack, Max Thieriot and Willow Smith.) (Bill Stamets) 

By Ray Pride

“The bear went to the top of the mountain to see what he could see, and what did the bear see when he got to the top? The other side of the mountain.”

If memory serves, I first heard that fairytale gobbet in a question-and-answer session with Jean-Marie Straub and Danielle Huillet at a Film Center retrospective ages ago, Straub oblique and elusive as a snowstorm quietly howled outside. My favorite aspect of Sundance 2008, which takes place 6,500 above sea level in Park City, Utah, up a mountain from Salt Lake City, is that I didn’t see Chicago’s week of overnight zero and sub-zero temperatures. It was lovely out-of-doors.
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