PICK DIGGERS A death in the family forces Hunt (Paul Rudd), a Long Island clamdigger, to face up to his becalmed life and those of his three brawling mates in Katherine Dieckmann’s terrific movie about a dying way of life. The Ford-Carter debates simmer quietly in the background, but Dieckmann doesn’t snow it with ’70s symbolism. This very particular movie has a lyrical feel for place, period and the rhythms of a small-town community trying —­­ and tragicomically failing — to run in place while the world around it opens its arms to the creeping corporatism that will compound the everyday hurts and losses suffered by this scruffy, messed-up group.

Rudd is sweet and funny as the floundering Hunt; Ron Eldard and Josh Hamilton are great as the town’s aimless studmuffin and philosophizing pothead, respectively. But the movie belongs to Ken Marino, who is riotously funny as the family man whose anger-management problem at last finds a fitting target in the big businessmen who come to destroy his living. Marino also wrote the outstanding script, which traps the foulmouthed vitality of working-class speech in a bottle and makes it sing.

Beautifully shot by Michael McDonough, Diggers is not a film you watch — it’s a movie you live in, and when time’s up you feel the same elegiac sense of loss as do those who realize they have no choice but to move on. (Nuart) (Ella Taylor)


FAKERS If you can’t count on a British con movie to deliver at least a few moments of entertaining color, well, then what can you count on? Director Richard James’ slight and wobbly Fakers comes close to shattering one’s faith in a just and orderly universe.

Written by Paul Gerstenberger, the story turns on the recycled travails of smalltime hustler Nick (Matthew Rhys), who has five days to pay back £50,000 to a London loan shark or end up sleeping with the fishes and chips. Lo and behold, the day Nick gets his deadline is the same day that the blond bartender (Kate Ashfield) he’s been chatting up for months turns out to have a naive brother (Tom Chambers) adept at making perfect copies of rare art works. And so the con is on but not without a cascade of equally unbelievable coincidences, a streak of good fortune that would put any self-respecting con artist to shame for being so beholden to blind chance.

Such artless inattention to the con man’s craft, however, might be overlooked if any of the characters or performers had the personality to pull one over on us, the audience. (Beverly Center, One Colorado) (Paul Malcolm)


THE FAR SIDE OF JERICHO Blink and you’ll miss the premiere and one-week Los Angeles run of The Far Side of Jericho, a rollicking “femme oater” directed by Tim Hunter, who has inexplicably languished as a television director for hire since making the 1986 indie classic River’s Edge and the pretty good 1993 drama The Saint of Fort Washington. Refreshingly free of solemn parallels with Society Today, this is no earth-mother Western either, though it’s plenty playful with its homage to Budd Boetticher’s Seven Men From Now.

Moderately wrinkled and as handy with a whiskey bottle as they are with a Smith Wesson, the three gangster widows (nicely played by character actresses Judith Burnett, Suzanne Andrews and Lissa Negrin) are automatically neither loyal nor kind to one another as they go on the run from several posses — led by a fake preacher (James Gammon) and a crooked sheriff played by Patrick Bergin — with a more than passing interest in the treasure buried by their husbands before they were hanged. The movie gives every cheerful appearance of having been shot with no time and less money, and it doesn’t have much on its mind, unless you count the moral integrity supplied by local Apaches more by way of Mel Brooks than Howard Hawks. It’s a fun night out, though, and if you show up, you’ll have the added satisfaction of being a good film citizen who might help this jolly Western to a commercial release.