Felicity Huffman is absolutely brilliant as a pre-op male to female transsexual forced to take a cross-country road trip with the son she never knew she had in the smart, touching dramedy, “Transamerica.”

A film that’s all about family, “Transamerica” deftly addresses a delicate topic without ever digressing into campiness or making a parody out of the film’s subject matter.

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Rod Kimble is a naïf, a slacker living in a small US town with his mom, his younger brother, and his stepfather whose respect he craves. He also misses his dead dad, whom he thinks was Evel Knievel’s back-up. Rod, a man-child, believes that he is a stunt man. When his stepfather needs an operation, with help from his brother and his slacker pals, Rod hatches a plan to set a school-bus-jumping record on his moped. First, his crew and he have to raise money to rent the buses and build the ramp. Trouble is, Rod’s inept at his chosen career. Looming failure is complicated by the return of Denise, Rod’s next-door neighbor and secret heartthrob, who is home from college. Is public humiliation at hand? Written by {jhailey@hotmail.com}

“Houses don’t kill people. People kill people.” That’s as deep as this 2005 version of “The Amityville Horror” gets. But then again, I don’t know a single person who goes to an American horror movie and expects deep, philosophical entertainment. Studios understand that and anything that’s even slightly intellectual is yanked out of the horror genre and labeled a thriller. And this isn’t a thriller by any stretch of the imagination. This new, reworked, revamped “Amityville Horror” is a full-on horror flick with character development taking a back seat to ghosts and other things that go bump in the night (at 3:15am to be exact).

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