Review: The Missing is the crowning achievement of Ron Howard's directorial career.

Pride, Unprejudiced: The Missing, Ron Howard's latest movie, drawn from Richard Eidson's little-known and almost unreadable pulp novel "The Last Ride," is a gritty, brutal, often unpleasant portrait of a family crisis in 1885 New Mexico, in what Howard describes as "warped and strange and tragic" times.

The story of Maggie Gilkeson (Cate Blanchett), a young woman raising her two daughters in an isolated and lawless wilderness. When her oldest daughter (Evan Rachel Wood) is kidnapped by a psychopathic killer with mystical powers (Eric Schweig), Maggie is forced to re-unite with her long estranged father (Jones) to rescue her. The killer and his brutal cult of desperados have kidnapped several other teenage girls, leaving a trail of death and horror across the desolate landscape of the American Southwest. Maggie and her father are in a race against time to catch up with the renegades and save her daughter, before they cross the Mexican border and disappear forever.

Tommy Lee Jones .... Samuel Jones
Cate Blanchett .... Maggie Gilkeson
Evan Rachel Wood .... Lily
Simon Baker .... Honesco
Jenna Boyd .... Dot Gilkeson
Aaron Eckhart .... Brake Baldwin
Clint Howard .... Sheriff Purdy
Rance Howard .... Telegrapher
Val Kilmer .... General

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