Filled with bleak, beautiful Hopperesque tableaus and strange characters whose lives intersect.

Its doomed portrait of guileless dreamers may be found lacking in plot activity and empathetic characters. But for anyone interested in a movie that wipes clean the grungy patina of self-delusionment, Jackpot hits solid pay dirt.

Gries and Morris act up a storm as the optimistically named Sunny Holiday and his long-suffering manager.

The acting is primo and the cinematography, on high-definition video by the gifted M. David Mullen, is striking.

In its mastery of its moments, Jackpot has charm, humor and poignancy. What it lacks is necessity. There's a sense in which we're always waiting for it to kick in.

This dogged journey of self-delusion is interrupted periodically by snippets of footage...that promise a dark revelation that would give an edge to the otherwise tedious goings-on but, sadly, never materializes.

Jackpot has much that is sweet and funny, but it is not overly original--and it is overly long and not as coherent as it might be.

A very depressing movie.

Michael and Mark Polish's debut feature, "Twin Falls, Idaho," was a cloying oddball love story involving adult male Siamese twins; their follow-up, Jackpot, is another piece of whimsical Americana.

The mood is hermetic to the point of claustrophobia, embellished with a sense of everyday surrealism indebted to David Lynch.