Review: An engrossing, thoroughly entertaining movie with great performances from a first-rate ensemble cast.

Story: Clearly influenced by the 2005 Oscar-winning Crash, writer/director Wayne Kramer’s multi-character, segmented story focuses on the hot-button issue of immigration – illegal and otherwise – told from several vantage points. A teenager (Summer Bishil) is targeted as a potential terrorist because of an essay she wrote; a young mother (Alice Braga) fights to keep her child after being deported; an Australian actress (Alice Eve) prostitutes herself to get a green card. We also meet a Korean teen, a British musician, a Mexican worker and others, whose lives and dreams of American citizenship intersect with a group of people working for and closely with the Immigration and Customs Enforcement office in L.A. Chief among them is Max Brogan (Harrison Ford), a veteran but burnt-out agent not beyond bending the law to uphold the fading ideals that brought him to the job in the first place.

Acting: Ford is terrific in a low-key but touching portrayal of a man struggling to keep up with a changing world of immigration law, clinging to the moral compass that originally got him started. It’s not the kind of starring role we normally see him do, but he blends nicely into a superb ensemble of international actors. Ray Liotta is rather effective as a hapless applications manager willing to risk his career and marriage to an immigration defense attorney (an understated Ashley Judd) for a sordid affair with an Australian actress, played by the sultry Alice Eve. This aggressive bimbo is cheating on her likeable British boyfriend, sweetly played by Jim Sturgess (21) as both try desperately to get a green card in equally unethical ways. Other standouts in the large cast include Bishil as a young, suspected terrorist and the wonderful Braga as an illegal Mexican factory worker trying to hang on to her son.

Direction: Kramer’s in-your-face, vivid directorial style has served him well in the critically acclaimed The Cooler and even his over-the-top but entertaining second film, Running Scared. With Crossing Over, he generally tones it down to tell a tricky, multi-level story, in which he tries to juggle several characters constantly merging in and out of the film. If it’s not ultimately as successful as Crash, this storytelling technique is, in many ways, just as effective due to the subject matter. Kramer, a South African, became a naturalized American citizen himself in 2000 and knows this scenario all too well. He paints us a picture of people caught up in this fast-changing world of immigration and using any means to keep their dreams alive against long odds.

Bottom Line: Hollywood.com rated this film 3 stars.

What It’s About?: Two childhood buddies are forever changed by their first encounter with Playboy magazine. The story picks up 10 years later, focusing on Tucker Cleigh, a sex-obsessed moron who beds every girl he meets, plus his conservative friend, Eugene Bell, who practices abstinence with his uptight girlfriend Cindi and joins her in teaching its virtues to younger students. But when Cindi decides she’s ready to “do it” on prom night, Eugene nervously complies but gets drunk, falls down a flight of stairs and lands in a four-year coma. When he awakens, he discovers Cindi has become a nude Playboy centerfold and joins Tucker on a chaotic cross-country trip to get to the Playboy mansion where he hopes to find Cindi – and Tucker gets to live out his wildest playmate fantasies.

Who’s In It?: Miss March exists as a comic vehicle for its “stars,” Zach Cregger and Trevor Moore, members of a Brooklyn comedy group whose TV show The Whitest Kids U Know ran for several seasons on IFC. The team also co-directs and writes this witless hodgepodge of gross-out gags, attempting to find humor in tasteless – not to mention sexist – setups. It makes last summer’s The House Bunny look like Citizen Kane by comparison. Moore seems to be channeling early Jim Carrey as he plays a sex-crazed idiot who spends most of the movie trying to help his best friend (played by Cregger) lose his virginity despite an endless array of inanely conceived psychological and medical obstacles. With no one to rein them in, these writer/director/stars overplay to the extreme and go for the cheapest laughs imaginable. Trying to mine physical humor out of situations dealing from epileptic sex to uncontrolled bowels, this team throws it all at the wall – but not much sticks. The rest of the cast including Raquel Alessi, Molly Stanton, 2007 Playmate of the Year Sara Jean Underwood and Craig Robinson – as an expletive-hurtling rapper named Horsedick.MPEG (in a gag repeated at least 10 times) – is left twisting in the wind. Robinson, however, does get mileage out of a triple-X hardcore rap parody.

What’s Good?: A scene where Eugene and Cindi try to teach sexual abstinence to a sparse audience of inattentive undergrads is amusing and well played. Unfortunately, it occurs in the first 10 minutes. After that, you’re on your own.

What’s Bad?: Just about everything else, including a dopey subplot involving a group of revenge-seeking firemen, desperate stunt-laden gags, egregiously over-the-top product placement for Playboy and one embarrassing scene after another designed to get the hardest R-rating possible.

Most Memorable Line: Playboy founder Hugh Hefner, 82, gets to offer this bon mot in his one-scene cameo: “There’s a bunny deep down inside every woman, and if you see that bunny, you’re on to something.”

Go Out And Get Popcorn When …

The opening credits start. Then, sneak into a better movie instead.

Bottom Line: Hollywood.com rated this film 1/2 star.