Eve's Bayou

Set in Louisiana's backwater Creole community during the late '50s, Kasi Lemmons's gothic exploration of womanhood is piercing in conception but languorous in execution. It's a coming-of-age tale about two adolescent sisters, Eve (Jurnee Smollett) and Cisely (Meagan Good), who are coping with a dysfunctional family. Things begin inauspiciously when Eve catches her father, Louis (Samuel L. Jackson), with a neighbor's wife in the wine cellar. They get worse when Louis's strayings hit even closer to home.

The redoubtable Jackson is in a tough spot here: his middle-class house doctor with an overactive libido is not merely bad, he's despicable and selfish. And the convoluted cast of characters gets even more perplexing with the radiant Lynn Whitfield as Louis's controlling wife, soap star Debbi Morgan as Louis's psychic sister who has serendipitously lost three husbands, and poor Diahann Carroll as a squalid fortuneteller. Lemmons, making her directorial debut, has set her sights high, but her amateurish, pretentious craftsmanship makes for stilted results. A line from her own script sums up the film: "If there's no point at all, then that's the point." At the Nickelodeon, the Kendall Square, and the Circle.

-- Tom Meek