A harrowing portrait of a poor Mexican girl who happens to be an illegal-immigrant-to-be. The story doesn’t emerge as hers until after a first half that is caught up in gang violence and initiation. Echoes of other Latin American stories – Amores Perros and Maria Full of Grace in particular – are unavoidable, with Gomorrah in mind, too, as much for the grittiness and air of hopelessness that coats the unwashed bodies as for any plot similarities. At the end, you feel you have witnessed a slice of life, as it is desperately lived in poorer societies. Maybe we are too jaded or removed to draw any conclusions, but not to feel.

Timothy Spall is not your normal love interest, in a buddy pic no less; nor is it usual to find a biopic about a soccer coach failing big-time, although the film adds a true-life documentary PS that shows everything coming out right. After portraying Tony Blair and David Frost in somewhat similar equivocal roles, Michael Sheen goes all out as Brian Clough, an ambitious, conceited jerk, really, whom we have to root for – partly because everyone else in the story, Spall excepted, is worse. One thing I missed was any sense of why Clough was such a successful coach (“the best manager the national team never had”), especially when he spent the games in the stands or, in one case, in the locker room. An English moviegoer would undoubtedly have known more than me and presumably had quite a different take.

Just when I thought there couldn’t be a scene more unbelievable than the last, Ellen Page and her Ashton Kutcher boyfriend found an unguarded indoor swimming pool, dove in with all their clothes and shoes on and proceeded to make love in an underwater ballet. Two years after playing a teen in Juno, Page, by now at least 25, sullied that memory by purporting to be another rebellious 17-year-old, who somehow metamorphs into a professional roller-derby star in moments stolen from her high school and waitress job. I could go on and on about everything that annoyed me, but I would just get annoyed again.

No plot. No drama. A superficial look at a superficial subject, although I will say that Anna Wintour commanded the camera. The Devil Wears Prada was better.

Why would a successful call girl choose suicide, in such deliberate fashion no less? Why would a Catholic priest risk his career, and his life, to stop her, without even knowing who she is? Despite such an unconvincing premise, I thoroughly enjoyed this movie’s indie pace, the encounters between characters, the small jokes (often at the expense of the Catholic Church), and the laid-back, very honest lead performance by Jeremy Sisto. The Minneapolis setting, in the end, neither helped nor hurt, but it got me (any many others) into the theater on a Thursday afternoon, the right time and place for the small pleasures this film afforded.