Every once in a great while a film turns up with so much emotional impact, integrity, dramatic richness and cinematic skill that it can inspire new optimism about the movie business, about America, about humanity itself. “Radio” represents precisely that sort of refreshing, altogether unexpected gift, a triumph at every level for all concerned.

For once, the promotional campaign doesn’t begin to do the justice to a movie. The tag line used in advertisements (“His Courage Made Them Champions”) suggests a manipulative melodrama about a mentally handicapped adult who somehow inspires an unstoppable high school football team. In reality, “Radio” offers satisfactions far more subtle – and substantive. Inspiration came from a touching 1996 Sports Illustrated article about a developmentally challenged lost soul who, over the course of 40 years, became the most beloved citizen of Anderson, S.C. Cuba Gooding, Jr. earns certain Oscar consideration for his career-topping performance as “Radio” – who wins his nickname through his love of music and his fascination with discarded or broken radios. Wandering through town with his shopping cart and his wide-eyed, shy and open-mouthed smile, he feels drawn to the high school football field to watch the players practice until the most arrogant members of the team play a prank by tying him up and locking him in a practice shed.

The straight arrow coach (Ed Harris in an utterly convincing, undeniably heartfelt performance) feels appropriately outraged by this act of wanton cruelty. He not only enforces carefully considered punishment (and life-changing object lessons) on the wrongdoers, but begins to reach out to the terrified victim. He offers him food, drink and an invitation to come onto the field to watch the team going through its drills. Eventually, the coach drives him out to the shack in the country where Radio lives with his widowed mother (S. Epatha Merkerson) who explains that her boy is “the same as everybody else, just a little slower than most.” In fact, the young man bears the mind (and the warm-hearted innocence) of a small child, and can speak only at an incoherent toddler level.

The coach looks beyond these shortcomings and adopts Radio as surrogate son, drawing him steadily closer to the football program and inspiring resentment and suspicion from the victory-obsessed small town boosters. In the process, Harris also pays more attention to his own long-suffering, football widow wife (Debra Winger) and cheerleader daughter (the fresh-faced, endearing Sarah Drew in a memorable debut). As the coach observes, the staff and students of the school (including compassionate principal Alfre Woodard) end up learning more from Radio than he ever learns from them. Those lessons emphasize connection and dependence and love and community with the realization that emerging as a winner doesn’t always involve scoring the most points. One of the film’s glories involves its obvious, irresistible affection for small town, high school football and all its timeless rituals, without succumbing to the predictable plot line about a miraculous run for the state championship. Fans of “Hoosiers” and “Remember the Titans” will love this film, that features some of the same vivid camera work, autumnal lighting, expert editing and colorful characterizations, but with a different (and deeper) sense of uplift and exhilaration at its conclusion.

Cuba Gooding goes far beyond his Academy Award-winning work in “Jerry Maguire,” not to mention his largely phoned-in performances in lesser, recent piffles like “Snow Dogs” and “The Fighting Temptations.” Unlike the show-offy pyrotechnics of other actors playing mentally challenged characters (think Oscar nominees Leonardo DiCaprio in “Who’s Eating Gilbert Grape,” John Mills in “Ryan’s Daughter,” or Cliff Robertson in “Charly”), Gooding delivers a masterpiece of understatement. You never focus on an actor-doing-an-amazing-job-as-a-brain-damaged-loser, and instead see a fully realized, fully human character with his delicate emotions perilously close to the surface. Following the example of the real-life citizens of Anderson, S.C., you learn to view Radio not as a lovable “retarded” guy, but as a lovable guy, period.

Director Mike Tollin (who’s created memorable sports documentaries, but whose only prior feature film was the slick, shallow baseball movie “Summer Catch”) took some liberties in re-arranging the facts of his story: in actuality, it was several coaches who befriended Radio, not just one, and his gradual acceptance as a fixture at the high school took many years, not just 1976 (a historical moment that the movie evokes effortlessly and fondly). As a bonus in the film’s final moments, Tollin provides richly moving footage showing the actual characters Gooding and Harris have played so well, some quarter century after the events of the film. In keeping with the project’s soulful humanity, even the less attractive characters (like the self-centered hotshot of the athletic department or his meddlesome banker dad) emerge with sympathetic, believable features.

Ed Harris, meanwhile, creates one of the most complex and admirable heroes in recent films – a hard-driving workaholic who preaches and exemplifies self-discipline, but develops an unlikely tenderness before our eyes. His brilliant performance creates a dilemma for all those who have noted his outspoken leftwing activism, and perhaps for Mr. Harris himself. Off camera, this richly accomplished actor not only gives voice to the Bush-bashing, America-blaming line so typical of the Hollywood elite, but devotes special attention to the cause of “abortion rights.” He recently spoke at the annual banquet for NARAL – the National Abortion Rights Action League – and stridently identified with their unapologetic pro-abortion stand. Ironically, the logic of this organization’s single-minded glorification of “pregnancy termination” would lead them to applaud the optional murder, in utero, of “damaged” human beings like Radio in the movie. One can only hope that Mr. Harris remains intelligent and open-minded enough to understand that whatever his “pro-choice” personal commitments, he has contributed his considerable talents to a movie that remains unavoidably, potently pro-life – with its insistence on the dignity, and infinite worth, of even the most imperfect and vulnerable human being. Rated PG, for brief flashes of rude language, but ideal entertainment for any moviegoers about the age of eight. FOUR STARS.

Despite the stirring success of “Radio,” good intentions in moviemaking do not always lead to good results, and Angelina Jolie’s preachy, pathetic “Beyond Borders” represents an especially painful case in point. She plays a pampered American wife of an upper-crust British husband (the underutilized Linus Roache) who’s so taken with a radical, renegade physician (the grubby, rugged Clive Owen) at a charity banquet that she follows him on a lifesaving mission to Ethiopia. The movie then offers a travelogue of suffering humanity hotspots, watching the two adulterous lovebirds as they jet set to elaborate locations of picturesque pathos in Cambodia and Chechnya in a dazzling pageant of pain. Amidst all the severed limbs, bloated bellies and starving masses, the two stars saunter unscathed and unstained, like impeccably groomed models for Abercrombie or Urban Outfitters.

To justify the heroine’s extramarital involvement, the script even throws in a brief interchange suggesting that her hubby cheated first, so everything’s okay. In addition to the long, smoldering, blue-eyed stares of its two over-acting principals, the film features tedious, clunky speeches about the necessity for spoiled Americans and Europeans to get involved in easing the misery of the less fortunate. The failure to place this message in even the most generalized spiritual context leaves the movie as substantively undernourished as the anorexic Ms. Jolie herself – who appears to carry at least a third of her body weight in her impossibly, impressively luxuriant lips. In personal life, she has adopted an impoverished child from Cambodia and committed a full one third of her considerable income to efforts to feed the world’s hungry multitudes. This sort of altruism commands respect, whatever the failings of the Oscar-winning star’s personal life, but her indulgent, insufferable motion picture richly earns the contempt it will inspire. “Beyond Borders” is “Beyond Boredom,” with its painfully protracted two-hour running time feeling like a maudlin marathon. ONE AND A HALF STARS. Rated R for incessant foul language, graphic and sometimes shocking violence, and one feeble, chemistry-free sex scene.

Michael Medved hosts a nationally syndicated daily radio show focusing on the intersection of politics and pop culture.  He's the author of eight non-fiction books, was co-host for 12 years on "Sneak Previews" on PBS, and is the former Chief Film Critic for the New York Post.