ALT=[Margaret's Museum] align=right width=163 height=225 vspace=5 hspace=15> There have been loads of them in the past, and if government subsidies continue, there'll be many more: sincere, humanist Canadian regional dramas that don't have enough muscle and brawn and punch for the USA. Margaret's Museum is a competently told love story set in the 1940s in a mining town in Cape Breton, and it almost gets exciting, thanks to a passionate guest turn by English actress Helena Bonham Carter. She's the uncombed, unsentimental, snorting protagonist, Margaret, who actively despises the coal mines that are the region's bread-and-butter. She hates them so much, she threatens to leave her gentle, bagpipe-playing, D.H.-Lawrence-look-alike husband, Neil (Clive Russell), should he take a shoveling job.

Director Mort Ransen seems to have studied his John Ford, checking out How Green Was My Valley for the mining and The Quiet Man for a stubborn, locking-of-horns love story. But where Ford was a poet, soaring from the humorous to the lyrical to the tragic, Ransen is a mortal, ordinary talent. Margaret's Museum is pretty good; that's all. And that's probably not enough, even with the weird, not-quite-credible Grand Guignol ending. At the Coolidge Corner.

-- Gerald Peary