Traces

This is every parent's nightmare: Your kid goes off to school one morning--and never comes back. Based on the case of young New Yorker Etan Patz, who disappeared in the early 1980s, this film casts Kate Nelligan as the distraught mother who lashes out at the police (in the person of a relentless detective played by Judd Hirsch), who make her and her husband suspects, even as she hounds them to find her child and drives away her husband (David Dukes) and friends (including Stockard Channing) with her intensity and single-mindedness. The first film by producer Stanley Jaffe, all of the goodwill he earns two-thirds of the way through is squandered on a Hollywood ending that doesn't square with the real case: Etan Patz was never found. --Marshall Fine