Rocket Science - 7.0

This movie (from the director of Spellbound) is about a stuttering teenager who is drawn into the apparently intense world of high school debate teams by an over-achieving girl. It starts sort of slowly but quickly picks up as the main characters come into focus. Overall, this movie's biggest strength is that its characters are well-developed, original, relatively dynamic and generally likable. While far from a masterpiece, this is a good, quirky, enjoyable indie film (think a not quite as good Little Miss Sunshine), and a nice change of pace/transition from all the summer blockbusters, which with only a few exceptions (Bourne, Harry Potter) were pretty disappointing this year. Bring on Oscar season...