Hero

Alexandre Rockwell’s rangy, offhandedly eccentric Sundance award-winning second feature follows a disabled teenager and his older adoptive sisters who, when pronounced by some protective-services bureaucrat to be “not our idea of a normal family,” shed their gloomy urban confines and set out for Truth or Consequences, New Mexico. En route they absorb another misfit wayfarer who notes the boy’s hobby of snapping Polaroids. “I guess this is your way of socializing, huh?” “No,” he answers. “It’s my way of seeing.” Rockwell gathers vitalizing details both grand and small but he is mostly inspired by singular characters who seem like real, mysterious human beings.