(We can’t help being film geeks, though, hence the breadth of what we tend to cover.) The same questions ... Efron plays the titular Charlie St Cloud, a young man with a future at an Ivy League ...

Charlie St. Cloud has no safety hatch. It just offers the real stuff - heartbreak, exultation, metaphysical mystery - under no cover of self-protective cynicism. It dares to be corny, but isn't.

"Charlie St. Cloud" has no safety hatch. It just offers the real stuff - heartbreak, exultation, metaphysical mystery - under no cover of self-protective cynicism. It dares to be corny, but isn't.

As book and film, “Charlie St. Cloud” is spiritual comfort food that suggests the dead never leave us — in even more literal terms than in “The Lovely Bones” — and that love for one ...