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 GO PICK DOWN IN THE VALLEY  “Tobe” (Evan Rachel Wood), short for October, is a San Fernando Valley teen who impulsively invites a lonely but cute-looking stranger named Harlan (Edward Norton) to join her on a jaunt to the beach. Harlan dresses and talks like a cowboy, and he has either madness or poetry in him — maybe both — because he walks straight off his job at a filling station by way of saying yes. They shortly become lovers. Writer-director David Jacobson has an excitingly clear-eyed, unsentimental feel for the intensity of adolescent passion. Wood inhabits Tobe’s swoony romantic nature and unrestrained sex drive without losing her balance. Norton, in turn, remains blazingly lucid as a performer even as Harlan must go off the deep end, holding Tobe, her kid brother Lonnie (Rory Culkin) and us in his complicated thrall. Harlan is at least 10 years older than Tobe, a fact that even her belligerent, protective father, Wade (David Morse, pitch-perfect as usual), leaves unremarked as he tries to chase Harlan out of their lives. But what’s dangerous about Harlan isn’t that he’s older; it’s that he’s psychologically even younger than Tobe. (There’s a hint of homage to Kit Carruthers, the lost bad boy of Terrence Malick’s Badlands, in that Harlan’s last name is also Carruthers, but Jacobson never belabors this.) Harlan leads Tobe on impulsive, scofflaw adventures and schemes to overthrow her father, but (in his best moments) also supplies her little brother with the simple love and attention the boy (and maybe Harlan himself) has never had. At first it is Wade who plays the heavy in this drama, as fathers must. Then Harlan takes over that role as his problems become too overwhelming for Tobe, for the law, for himself. The climax, a wildly cinematic chase through the little wilderness that’s left, detours (with just the right touch of dry wit) across a Western movie set, and yet, despite the heady thematic touches, loses none of its suspense, because the characters are so richly developed, and death so present, that we’re violently kept guessing as to who might prevail. (Selected theaters) (F.X. Feeney) GOAL! THE DREAM BEGINS Aside from a flirtation with the hot-button immigration issue, this inspirational movie about an underdog soccer player from tough East Los Angeles is pretty standard stuff. Mexican TV heartthrob Kuno Becker stars as Santiago Munez, a rec-league standout who lands a trial with the fabled Newcastle United club of northeastern England. The appealing young man’s tribulations are predictable, his triumph inevitable; while he gets respect (and the girl, played by Anna Friel), we get another Rocky-style dose of emotional uplift, cloaked in the usual game-day clichés. Not a bad movie, but as familiar as Alex Rodriguez’s batting average. Two sequels are already in the works, probably aimed at the soccer-crazy international market. Brit director Danny Cannon and Brit screenwriters Dick Clement and Ian Le Frenais know their fútbol, but will American moviegoers pay to play? (Citywide) (Bill Gallo)

JUST MY LUCK Looking tired and sallow and drained of her customary glow, Lindsay Lohan marches grimly through this mechanical tween comedy as if it were a particularly tedious homework assignment. Which it is: The kind of switcheroo premise that so deftly showcased Lohan’s instinctive gift for physical comedy in Freaky Friday falls flat as a pancake in this lame slice of slapstick about a go-ahead Manhattanite whose habitual good luck runs out when she kisses a luckless stranger (the anodyne Chris Pine) who’s trying in vain to make it as a rock producer with such implausibly uncommercial material as the British boy band McFly. As his good fortune waxes, hers wanes, thus exposing them both to a rapid succession of excruciating sight gags involving dog poop, cat poop and endless rain without benefit of umbrella. Directed by Donald Petrie (Miss Congeniality) from a colorless script by I. Marlene King and Amy Harris, Just My Luck is so unremittingly chipper, you want to shoot it on sight. Lohan is a great talent whose gravel-voiced poise promises an intriguing transition from child performer to young siren, but if she continues to cut up for the tabloids and lend herself to rubbish like this and Herbie Fully Loaded, she’s going to end up remembered as no more than a sad little party animal. (Citywide) (Ella Taylor)

GO  KEEPING UP WITH THE STEINS The Steins of Brentwood held their son’s bar mitzvah celebration on an ocean liner at sea, with party sets modeled after the movie Titanic — how do you top that? Such is the dilemma facing Hollywood agent Adam Fiedler (Jeremy Piven), whose son Benjamin (Daryl Sabara) isn’t sure that his dad’s plan for a Dodger Stadium extravaganza is the best way to go. Although first time director Scott Marshall and screenwriter Mark Zakarin nimbly satirize West L.A. excess, Keeping Up with the Steins  is actually more of a valentine to Jewish family life — one that goes down a lot sweeter than the recent, similarly-themed When Do We Eat? Marshall is the nephew of actor-director Penny Marshall (Laverne & Shirley to Awakenings) and the son of TV producer-movie director Garry Marshall (Happy Days to Pretty Woman), who here gives a funny, surprisingly restrained performance as Adam’s long lost father, a man with a knack for cutting to the heart of the Talmudic teachings that have Benjamin so tongue-tied. As director, Scott Marshall displays an unsurprising flair for selling a joke, but also a fine sense of dramatic pacing and, even better, a gift for brevity, neither of which, it could be argued, are innate skills of his famous filmmaking family. (Selected theatres) (Chuck Wilson)