For his 17th feature film, writer/director John Sayles performs one of his periodic 180 degree shifts. Throughout his 33-year directing career, the gifted chronicler of the histories and familial legacies of small-town Americana (in films such as Lone Star and Honeydripper) has occasionally ventured outside that comfort zone. The Irish-set Secret of Roan Inish and the Spanish language, Latin American-set Men with Guns are among Sayles’s best-reviewed works. In Amigo, his most ambitious film yet, the filmmaker heads to the Philippines, circa 1900, for an old-fashioned yet all-too-resonant portrait of U.S. imperialism run amok. There’s an aesthetic stiffness to certain elements of Sayles’s picture, which concerns the drama that plays out in a fictional village during the Philippine-American war. The camerawork is stately and largely of the front-and-center medium shot variety, while the limited, spare jungle setting exudes a sort of abstract theatricality. It’s not always the most vibrant enterprise as it charts the ups-and-(mostly) downs of the American occupation of that village. The cross-cutting between the activities of the soldiers and the Filipino rebels is at times rather heavy-handed, following a pattern that appears to have been determined by Sayles’s desire to give them equal air time, so to speak, rather than the natural flow of the narrative.

One can see why the people of Sundance loved Winter’s Bone enough to give it the Grand Jury Prize and the Waldo Salt Screenwriting Award. Upon initial appearance it’s exactly the type of independent film beloved at the festival in Utah that later goes unnoticed by the rest of the world.

Sarah is in jail, facing FBI prosecution. John and Cameron are holed up in a seedy motel, waiting for things to blow over.

John discovers that Savannah Weaver is a target of a Terminator. John Henry detects the threat and tries to lead Savannah to safety. When the Garbage Terminator learns her daughter has been kidnapped, she enlists the help of both John Henry and Agent Ellison to track her down.

Kevin Carr reviews this week’s new movies: Race to Witch Mountain, Last House on the Left and Miss March.

Sarah finds herself in the hospital with a gunshot wound from her shoot-out at the Skynet warehouse. She escapes the hospital and kidnaps a doctor to help take the bullet out, all the time hallucinating a visit with Kyle Reese. The retrofitted Terminator John Henry is learning about himself and the operation while the Garbage Terminator takes matters into her own hands… literally.

Sarah is continuing her research on the three dot symbol that has been haunting her visions. This leads her to a UFO convention and a conspiracy theorist in hiding who might have a connection to the manufacturing of the Machines.

Sarah and Cameron are hot on the track of the people they believe have The Turk. Meanwhile, John is still pining over Riley, who receives a visitor that explains some secrets. And Agent Ellison works with the Garbage Terminator to interview a growing artificial intelligence.

In the grand style of Vantage Point, The Sarah Connor Chronicles tells this episode’s story from multiple points of view. John (Thomas Dekker) runs off for the weekend with Riley (Leven Rambin) and ends up in a Mexican jail.