In theaters

HOLES, directed by Andrew Davis, written by Louis Sachar, based on his novel, 117 minutes, rated PG.

Imagine directing a movie called “Holes” and realizing that if you didn’t dig deep enough, your movie would be a shallow, inconsequential pit. If the irony didn’t kill you, critics and audiences would.

It’s just that situation director Andrew Davis faced when he signed on to adapt Louis Sachar’s popular 1998 novel, “Holes,” for the big screen. Considered a modern-day classic by some, the book not only has a built-in audience of millions but it also has won its share of critical success, such as the National Book Award and the prestigious Newbery Medal – honors that might intimidate even the most confident of directors.

Still, taking a cue from Chris Columbus, who directed the Harry Potter films, Davis nevertheless rose to the challenge, working from Sachar’s own screenplay to come through with a winning adaptation, an entertaining, coming-of-age parable that explores issues of race, injustice, tolerance and love without ever once talking down to its intended audience of young people.

In the film, Shia LeBeouf is Stanley Yelnats, a beleaguered Texas teen saddled with chronic bad luck thanks to the curse Madam Zeroni (Eartha Kitt) placed on his family 150 years ago.

Now, like everyone in the Yelnats clan, Stanley’s life is a calamitous wreck, a fact quickly established in the film’s opening moments, when he’s accused of stealing a pair of baseball cleats and thus is sentenced to 18 months at Camp Green Lake, a desert prison camp for juvenile offenders run by the vicious Warden (Sigourney Weaver), the villainous Mr. Sir (Jon Voight) and the squirrelly Dr. Pedanski (Tim Blake Nelson).

For the ragtag team of boys doing their time at Camp Green Lake, each day is met with the unthankful task of standing in the blistering sun while digging a hole precisely 5 feet deep and 5 feet wide.

Why all the digging? The idea is that hard labor builds character, which these boys need. Still, one suspects there are other, more insidious reasons for the digging, which the film explores by reaching into the past. There, in the Old West, answers are found in the ruinous, interracial affair between Kate Barlow (Patricia Arquette), a white schoolteacher, and Sam (Dule Hill), the black onion dealer who comes to love her.

Big on plot and just as big on character, “Holes” is the rare movie that respects its audience, young and old, which is a surprise since it comes from Davis, whose “Collateral Damage” and “Chain Reaction” did neither.

The acting is especially strong, particularly from Voight, who plays Mr. Sir with the sort of boozy, menacing leer that suggests his liver is harboring a nest of tequila worms, and also from Weaver, who manages to be sexy and repellent with the mere flip of her unruly hair.

Complex and dark, the story lines crisscrossing each other with the speed of one of Mr. Sir’s bullets, “Holes” is sometimes too dense for its own good and its ending is especially pat, but those are minor pitfalls in a movie that does so many things right, it goes a long way in restoring faith in the Hollywood machine that created it.

Grade: B+

On video and DVD

MYSTIC MASSEUR, directed by Ismail Merchant, written by Caryl Phillips, 117 minutes, PG.

In Ismail Merchant’s “Mystic Masseur,” the focus is on books, the power they possess, and how one man’s life is dramatically changed in his quest to write them. It’s about as far removed from a blockbuster as one can get – which, for some, likely will be a big part of its charm.

The film, from a script Caryl Phillips based on Nobel laureate V.S. Naipaul’s 1957 debut novel, takes place in the British-colonial Trinidad of the 1940s and early 1950s.

It follows Ganesh Ransumair (Aasif Mandvi), a former schoolteacher from Port of Spain, Trinidad, who returns to his native village after his father’s death, decides to stay when he marries a local woman named Leela (Ayesha Dharker), and then sets out to complete his dream of writing books.

His first book, “One Hundred Questions and Answers on the Hindu Religion,” is such a bust, he literally goes broke and must assume, due to financial desperation, his father’s former job as a mystic healer. Calling himself the Mystic Masseur, Ganesh quickly hits it big, launching a career that paves the way to his desired career as a writer and ultimately as a politician.

If “Mystic Masseur” is sometimes a bit long in the massage and misses the satirical snap of Naipaul’s novel, it nevertheless offers a compelling glimpse into Trinidad politics near the end of the British colonial era.

What lifts it is Merchant’s affection for his characters, especially Ganesh, whose relationships with Leela, his conniving father-in-law, Ramlogan (Om Puri), and his feisty aunt (Zohra Segal), gives the film the humor and the dramatic tension it needs – and would have seriously lacked without them in it.

Grade: B

Christopher Smith is the Bangor Daily News film critic. His reviews appear Mondays and Fridays in Style, and are archived on RottenTomatoes.com. He can be reached at BDNFilm1@aol.com.

THE Video-DVD Corner

Renting a video or a DVD? NEWS film critic Christopher Smith can help. Below are his grades of recent releases in video stores. Those capped and in bold print are new to video stores this week.

Auto Focus ? C

The Banger Sisters ? B

Barbershop ? B+

The Bourne Identity ? B+

Drumline ? B+

8 Mile ? C

8 Women ? B

Far From Heaven ? A

Femme Fatale ? C+

Formula 51 ? F

The Four Feathers ? C

Full Frontal ? D

Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets ? B+

Half Past Dead ? F

Igby Goes Down ? A

I Spy ? C-

Jackass: The Movie ? B

Knockaround Guys ? D

Lilo & Stitch ? B+

Maid in Manhattan ? B-

Minority Report ? A-

Moonlight Mile ? B

My Big Fat Greek Wedding ? A-

MYSTIC MASSEUR ? B

One Hour Photo ? A-

Possession ? B

REAL WOMEN HAVE CURVES ? A-

Red Dragon ? B+

The Ring ? C

The Road to Perdition ? A-

Secretary ? B+

Spirited Away ? A

Spy Kids 2 ? B+

STANDING IN THE SHADOWS OF MOTOWN ? B+