The Girl (2012)

Written and directed by David Riker, who built his 1998 drama "La Ciudad" around immigrants in New York City, The Girl is stingy with backstory but rich with visual clues.

Hernandez is soulful and affecting, though, and Cornish embodies Ashley's self-centered character with nuance and subtlety.

Anyone who finds this conclusion a humanistic or socially reprehensible dealbreaker can hardly be faulted. Before these questionable issues come to a head and then falter in the finale, there is a lot of value in The Girl.

Uses the perils of immigrating to this country without papers as a backdrop for a poor white American woman's bumpy path to enlightenment.

The Girl sounds like a real mess. It isn’t. It’s just a slow, well-made human interest story on a very small scale, ultimately touching but as inconsequential as a slice of pineapple at a Hawaiian luau.