One of Stephen Gaghan's principal strengths as a writer and filmmaker is his ability to embrace ambiguity, to stare complex issues squarely in the face and render them in all their faceted complexity.

Gaghan, whose screenplay for Steven Soderbergh's "Traffic" deservedly captured an Oscar, appears to have little patience with simplistic takes on difficult subjects, though he skirts dicey terrain with Friday's opening of "Syriana," a thriller about big oil, global politics and terrorism. It's a movie that easily could slip into the shopworn delusions of a somewhat similar 2005 drama, "The Constant Gardener," a finely acted, well-directed bit of balderdash.

Then again, not every director has firsthand experience with the world he is translating to film. In 2003, while standing in line at customs at the Beirut airport, Gaghan got an anonymous cellphone call that lured him - one would have to say foolishly - to a waiting car. He was whisked (one is never simply "transported" in such stories) to a remote village where armed men blindfolded him and drove him to a secret locale. There he met Lebanese militant Sheik Mohammed Hussein Fadlallah, a leader of Hezbollah. Fadlallah knew Gaghan was preparing to make a movie and politely offered his point of view on the issues before returning his guest to the airport.

The experience doubtless afforded his new script some added gravity. The not-quite kidnapping surfaces in fictional form in "Syriana," which pivots on the actions of four characters: an over-the-hill CIA agent (George Clooney), an energy analyst (Matt Damon) who advises the prince of an oil-rich country in the Persian Gulf, Washington, D.C. attorney (Jeffrey Wright) and an unemployed Pakistani laborer (Mazhar Munir).

Gaghan also invested several weeks in traveling through the Middle East with former CIA agent Robert Baer, whose best-selling memoir "See No Evil" provided the picture with its inspiration.

Iraq is never even mentioned in the movie, but it is never far from one's mind, either. Gaghan says his message is far more straightforward than his plot: That for every action, there are consequences, many of them unanticipated .

It may not live up to its billing as "Film School in a Box," but doubtless there is much to enjoy in Delta Entertainment Corp.'s new DVD of "Sunday Morning Shootout: The Best of Season 1," featuring hosts Peter Bart and Peter Guber in conversation with many of Hollywood's more intriguing luminaries. And some not, of course.

do their best to be provocative while entertaining and sometimes educating us on the industry, "from indie filmmaking to big-budget blockbusters, from opening weekend box-office grosses to opening night on the red carpet plus incredible moments at the Cannes Film Festival or Sundance." Season 1 sports Clint Eastwood, Charlize Theron, Samuel L. Jackson, Denzel Washington, Harvey Weinstein and others.Bonus features include a sneak peek into Season 2's best-of compilation.

American Indians often referred to the transgendered among them as "two-spirit people," revering these individuals for their ability to experience both sides of the human equation. White settlers generally shot them on sight.

One wonders if we've come very far since then, in terms of underlying attitudes. Oh, we talk a good game intellectually, and as a culture, extolling the virtues of acceptance and rejecting intolerance, but that tends to be veneer. Perhaps unconsciously, 1 million years of evolution still tell us that something about such people is wrong, distorted, even dangerous. Is it not so much transsexuals that we find threatening, but what they represent: That the two genders are not quite so clearly separated and discrete as most think. Sexual identity is a malleable thing.

"TransAmerica," written and directed by Duncan Tucker, surveys this terrain with an eye both poignant and comic, then burrows its way into your consciousness with a wonderful performance by Felicity Huffman. That, and a refusal to succumb to conventional plot developments.

The usually glamorous star of TV's "Desperate Housewives," Huffman stars as Bree (formerly Stan) Osbourne, a refined, pre-operative male-to-female transsexual. Osbourne's road to reassignment surgery takes an unexpected detour when she discovers to her shock that she fathered a son, Toby (Kevin Zegers), now a teenage runaway hustling tricks on the streets of New York.

The title refers not only to Bree's passage into womanhood and the often misunderstood transsexual subculture, but to the transcontinental journey of mutual discovery she undertakes with her son, whom she rescues from jail.

Tucker guides the film with a sure hand, and provides it with a script that is never pat, and declines to take the easy way out. The sad, bittersweet moments ring true, as do the periods of bewilderment. Yet the film is also very funny. Look for it early next year.

Those sufficiently ancient to recall the Great Upset of 1966, when a team sporting a black starting five was the first to win the NCAA basketball title, may be enthused to see "Glory Road," a dramatization of that epic national championship game pitting little-regarded Texas Western against Adolph Rupp's mighty, all-white Kentucky Wildcats.

Forty minutes of basketball brought Texas Western coach Don Haskins an estimated 40,000 pieces of hate mail and a dozen death threats from people incensed that blacks and whites were even in the same court. Texas Western won a shocker, 72-65, though the reality was simply that the TW players were better.

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