Even the best actors — and I'd rank Joaquin Phoenix and Mark Ruffalo among their generation's finest — can't save a movie that aims for tragedy but stalls at soap opera. Directed by Terry George from a novel by John Burnham Schwartz, the film concerns a hit-and-run that shatters two families. Phoenix plays the father who sees a car slam into his ten-year-old son. Ruffalo is the driver who flees the scene and hides his trail when the child dies. Jennifer Connelly and Mira Sorvino portray wives caught in the crossfire. By the time the grieving father picks up a gun, you know exactly where the film is headed. The foreboding weighs a ton.

“He Will Break Your Heart”

A lightly swinging Latin-influenced, almost cha-cha groove and close harmonies decorated Jerry Butler's early soul hit "He Will Break Your Heart," delivering a stately warning that his rival would never love his girl like he did. The melody came to Butler as he was driving on the highway from Atlantic City, New Jersey, to Philadelphia with Curtis Mayfield, and as Butler told Rolling Stone, "I just sang the melody and Curtis put the chords to it." The song's premise, Butler added, "was something that I'd lived ...The lyric was an experience rather than a revelation. Whereas music is usually a revelation."