The Company You Keep

A stellar cast of indie-film workhorses such as Stanley Tucci, Chris Cooper, Brendan Gleeson, Richard Jenkins and Julie Christie can't give Robert Redford's lackluster thriller the oomph it needs. Redford (craggy and ageless) portrays a lawyer who goes on the run when a young reporter (an unconvincing Shia LaBeouf) uncovers his connection to a long-ago Weather Underground crime. (The fact that the radical group and the times it operated in must to be explained within this film doesn't bode well for audience engagement.) As the lawyer and the pursuing journalist hop around the country, the back story gets filled in, and with each new revelation it gets more ridiculous: What's pitched as a political thriller with shades of moral relativism turns increasingly into a hokey melodrama. Of local note: The Weather Underground once claimed a bombing at the Gulf Tower, and Redford's daughter is played by Pittsburgh's tiny opera singer, Jackie Evancho.