Writer/director Boaz Yakin's Fresh was perhaps the best of all the "'hood" films, if not the most plausible. Filled with colorful characters and told from the perspective of an adolescent much wiser than his years, Fresh showed that the inner city isn't all cold-blooded killing and aloof parents—though those elements were there, too. But forget all that, because A Price Above Rubies couldn't be more different. This time, Yakin tackles the tale of a wayward ultra-Orthodox Jewish woman, played by Renée Zellweger, who abandons her faith for a taste of sexual and financial independence. Married to a pious scholar who can't even make love for fear of somehow offending the rebbe, Zellweger is led into temptation by her husband's Satan-like brother, Christopher Eccleston. Eccleston enlists Zellweger in his black-market jewel trade, and also uses her as his love slave, but she soon becomes distracted by the work of a Puerto Rican artist. Along the way, she is guided by the spirit of her brother and a mysterious old crone. Zellweger acquits herself nicely in a role that screams for critical assassination: Her cheeks are flush with desire and confusion, and in a scene in which she covertly wolfs down an eggroll, she looks like she's expecting a bolt from God Himself at any minute. Potential casting snafus Julianna Margulies (as Zellweger's sister-in-law) and British actor Eccleston are surprisingly fine in their respective roles. But as a whole, A Price Above Rubies seems incomplete, a controversy-courting parable without a real point. The theme (woman buckles against the constraints of a patriarchal society) is not limited to the culture of Orthodox Jews; why Yakin chose to set his film in that arena is unclear. Zellweger seems to be rebelling against more than just Jewish tradition, but despite the strong performances and Yakin's strong sense of craft, A Price Above Rubies only alludes to centuries-old conflicts. Unlike its protagonist, it fails to break free of its boundaries.