Gospel Hill

Town hall tempers flare in this drama of good intentions but convoluted ideologies, set in a racially scarred Southern town that’s reeling from the arrival of white developers. It’s a familiar formula: Greedy suits touting high-rise schematics and targeting blue-collar citizens end up locking horns with a local firebrand (Bassett). Guess who wins? As a onetime civil-rights soldier, Danny Glover manages to say more with a single look than all of Bassett’s cookie-cutter soapbox routines combined—or for that matter, any of the movie’s preachy Perry Mason–episode polemics.