When it comes to the subject of community, David E. Kelley--the prolific writer-producer behind television's The Practice and Ally McBeal--falls somewhere on a continuum between directors Howard Hawks and Robert Benton. While Hawks's professional characters are bound by a knowledge of how to do what they do even if they don't know why, Benton's people, professional or not, have long ago substituted their own eccentric reasons for that elusive why.
As docudramas go, Jobs works better as a profile of an innovative company than of the demanding entrepreneur who cofounded it (Apple would have provided a more apt title). Director Joshua Michael Stern opens with the launch of the iPod, a notable development, but not an especially dramatic one, before backtracking to the college dropout days of the oft-barefoot Steve Jobs (Ashton Kutcher), who comes across as more of a ladies' man than a visionary.
Jennifer Connelly followed up her Academy Award for A Beautiful Mind with this dark but moving story of small mistakes that escalate, with tragic necessity, to disaster. In House of Sand and Fog, Kathy (Connelly) gets evicted from her house for failing to pay a tax she never should have been charged in the first place. The house is swiftly put up for auction and bought by a former military officer from Iran named Behrani (Ben Kingsley, Sexy Beast).
