Painfully awful mystery flick has Hawthorne-expert Coyote falling for a prison inmate (Kinski) via postal mail. About as slow as a fourth-class parcel, Red Letters is so convoluted and just plain stupid you'll stop wondering why it went straight to cable after about, oh, 35 minutes.

An American Rhapsody Review

By Rob Blackwelder

Very Good

Film doesn't get any more passionately personal than writer-director Eva Gardos' semi-autobiographical "An American Rhapsody," the deeply stirring story of a Hungarian family torn apart by Cold War persecution, reunited through immigration and tested by the stubborn determination of a teenage daughter to explore her roots.

Gardos lived with guardians in rural Hungary until she was 6 because her aristocratic Budapest parents -- publishers by trade -- had to leave their infant daughter behind in order to escape arrest in the wake of the 1949 Communist coup d'etat.

Resettled in suburban Los Angeles after an arduous, dangerous trek across barbed-wired borders to Switzerland, her mother persevered by persistently petitioning every politician and aid organization she could find for help securing little Eva's transport to America. When she finally succeeded, the girl was spirited from the arms of the only family she'd known to be flown to a strange new world of subdivisions, televisions, big sisters and Elvis Presley songs.

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