The most criminally overlooked movie of 2010?

It happens (at least to me) every year. You see a movie coming with a great cast, from directors you know and trust, but then it either gets caught up in the end-of-the-year rush or doesn't have quite enough star power to reach my little corner of the world.

That's what happened with Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck's "It's Kind of a Funny Story," which I had been looking forward to for much of 2010 but only managed to catch up with recently on DVD. Like the duo's other two movies, "Half Nelson" and the far superior "Sugar" (one of my favorite baseball movies), it's a flick full of humanity and also small, easygoing charm, and so the kind that can easily slip through the cracks.

As the movie begins, we meet 16-year-old Craig (Keir Gilchrist) on the day when the pressures of his teen life, overblown in his own mind, have driven him to the point where he thinks he's ready to commit suicide. Not exactly the funniest of subjects, right? But once he decides to check himself into a mental ward and, after telling the desk clerk he's considering suicide just gets handed a form to fill out, you can tell that Fleck and Boden, who wrote the script for this from the semiautobiographical tale by author Ned Vizzini, are going to gently walk a tightrope between unbearable solemnity and outright mockery for a middle ground that just worked for me.

When he tries to check in, Craig finds out he's being sent to the adult ward because the teen wing is under construction, and one of the first people he meets there is Bobby, a pleasantly low-key - for once - Zach Galifianakis. It isn't that he's turned off all the bluster that marks his brashest performances, but he instead channels all that mania and keeps it clearly simmering behind the wounded eyes of a man who, as he eventually tells Craig, has tried to commit suicide many times.

And though this is hardly a penetrating look at the true nature of mental illness, Boden and Fleck do stock the mental ward with charmingly damaged characters who give the movie plenty of humor but also lots of humanity along the way, from Craig's roommate Muqtada, who refuses to leave his room for most of the movie, to a hasidic jew who massively overdosed on acid. And of course, this being a teen movie, there has to be a love interest, fulfilled by Emma Roberts as Noelle who, like Craig, at that moment needs a reason to see the good sides of life.

But the real litmus test of how much you're going to enjoy "It's Kind of a Funny Story" is just how much you can stand Craig, an upper middle-class kid who, from the outset, clearly has many fewer real problems than he imagines. Again, however, Fleck and Boden handle this with a humorous and just dark enough touch, as when Craig first tries to explain his problems to Dr. Minerva, played by the always-welcome Viola Davis, and he lists his fear of terrorism and the sour economy as prominently as the parental pressure that's clearly driven him to this point.

The bottom line: This is indeed kind of a funny story, but a very human one too, and if you missed it the first time like me, it's well worth finding on DVD now.

The best movie of 2009 (so far, at least) .... flippin' sweet!

Before I get into all that, it's hard to tell who's the bigger winner with what's clearly the news of the day, Darren Aronofsky or us.

If I had to pick one, I'd say us, because along with being news that he's onto what should be a fascinating project, it hopefully means he's NOT making a remake of "Robocop." And if that's the first you're ever hearing of that, just pretend you never did, because hopefully now it will never happen.

Instead, the director of "The Wrestler" (one of my five favorite movies of 2008, along with "Let the Right One In," "Tell No One," "Slumdog Millionaire" and "Milk") is turning to competition of a different sort with something appropriately twisted called "Black Swan."

Actually, as I type this, it doesn't seem real, which seems just right: Natalie Portman is (almost) set to star in "a supernatural thriller set in the world of New York City ballet." Specifically, she'll play a veteran ballerina who finds herself locked in an intense rivalry with a fellow dancer who may or may not be just a figment of her imagination. Bring it on!

Here today, however, it's all about what I can firmly call, after stewing with it for a day or so, the best movie of 2009 (so far, at least.) Sure, "Star Trek" was as thoroughly fun as it was refreshing, and unlike many people, I thought "Watchmen" was a nearly flawless adaptation of Alan Moore's oddly great graphic novel, but the best flick I've seen so far is something on a far different scale, Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck's sublime baseball movie "Sugar."

Actually, what makes "Sugar" work so well is that it starts with baseball as a backdrop but then tackles something much more compelling: Life in modern America, and what it must look like to someone who's just arrived in our often bizarro world.

"Sugar" tells the story of Miguel "Sugar" Santos, a 19- (I think, but with Dominican players, of course, who knows?) year-old Dominican pitching prospect who's owned by a fictional Kansas City team and toiling with other prospects at what seems alternately like a summer camp or a prison yard - or maybe something in between, a summer camp that just happens to have guard towers.

From the outset, you get a strong sense of the movie's two strongest suits, it's natural - I'd go so far as to say "organic" - pacing, and the equally natural banter of the ballplayers and everyone they encounter in their new world.

Sugar, played with raw charm by Algeniz Perez Soto, catches the eye of a scout and eventually gets promoted all the way to AA minor league ball in Bridgeport, Iowa, which might as well have been Mars. At this point, the flick easily could have succumbed to either of two predictable and familiar courses, the fish-out-of-water story or the rah-rah sports flick, but instead it takes the best elements of each and pretty much turns them upside down.

Sugar is taken in by an elderly couple who are freakishly but never quite cartoonishly devoted to minor league baseball, which I sorely wish we still had here in Macon. During this stretch, the movie often finds it grace in quiet moments as Sugar adapts to his odd new world, and the best scene of all comes when he simply learns how to order breakfast in a restaurant.

And the games themselves, while they will seem real to anyone whose had the joy of watching minor league ball, are never pitched as anything more than that. Sure, they're important, but only as we see it through the eyes of Sugar and his fellow ballplayers in how they can advance their fledgling careers.

This game-by-game stretch can get a bit too methodical, but it deftly sets up the knuckle curve that is the third act, when Sugar's tale becomes one of the immigrant experience in America and, more importantly, of the power of rational adults to simply change their minds. I certainly won't spoil it by telling you how, but Sugar eventually ends up at the home of Yankee Stadium, and it just makes a cycle that perfectly fits this movie about baseball and much more.

With "Under the Same Moon," "Frozen River," "Sin Nombre," "The Visitor" and now "Sugar," immigration has quickly become my favorite sub-subject for movies, and it's not hard to see why. No other subject better invokes the peril of the human condition, and Boden and Fleck have captured this just right in a movie that I can't recommend you see soon enough (as to when that might be, however, who knows, because I think it's finished its theatrical run and I can't find a DVD release date in sight yet.)

And with that, I have to get ready for the job that still pays me just enough to get by in this odd place called America. Peace out.