Bless Me, Ultima

Directed by Carl Franklin

(PG-13)

***

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Bless Me, Ultima isn’t easy to categorize, but it’s “a rich pleasure to watch,” said Kenneth Turan in the Los Angeles Times. Based on Rudolfo Anaya’s classic 1972 Chicano novel, the film tracks a friendship that develops between a boy and a medicine woman in 1944 New Mexico, and director Carl Franklin (Devil in a Blue Dress) proves “ideally suited” to bring the story to the screen. He gives proper weight to its mix of realism and supernatural belief. But his touch is “a tad stiff,” said Michael Phillips in the Chicago Tribune. Though Miriam Colón is formidable as Ultima, and Luke Ganalon conveys wisdom beyond his years as her 6-year-old companion, the voice-over narration provided by his character as he looks back on the story “has the ring of a scrupulously faithful adaptation.” The movie also crams in too many themes, said Connie Ogle in The Miami Herald. Franklin wants to weigh rural life against city life, religion’s power against its excesses, even good versus evil. The story he’s working with is “ripe with potential,” but he “merely touches on most conflicts instead of exploring them in depth.”