Performed to the hilt by Flanery and filmed with conviction by Victor Salva, the movie is finally too solemn to survive its pushy musical strings.

Powder has all of the elements of a successful fantasy, and none of the insights. It's a movie where intriguing ideas lie there on the screen, jumbled and unrealized.

'90s sci-fi fantasy has violence, cursing.

_**"Can't imagine there's meanness; can't imagine one lie"**_ "Powder" was the first of two films that came out in 1995-1996 dealing with a gifted individual who is super-smart and has paranormal powers; the second was "Phenomenon" with John Travolta. "Powder" is the superior. While "Phenomenon" is good, "Powder" reaches for greatness and, in some ways, achieves it, even while it’s marred by a few dubious moments. Sean Patrick Flanery plays a hairless albino teen in East Texas, nicknamed Powder, who's discovered living in a basement after his grandfather's sudden death. As a ward of the state, he is placed in a boy's school where his uniqueness stirs up trouble. For a film like this to work you have to buy into the character, and this is one of the movie's strengths. Flanery reveals his acting expertise in his convincing portrayal of the shy, gifted teen. Flannery's Powder stands strong with the greatest misfits in cinema, like Nimoy's Spock and Hank's Forrest Gump. Actually, the acting is good across the board: Lance Henriksen as the hardened-but-open sheriff, Mary Steenburgen as a psychologist who grows to really care for Powder in a motherly way, Jeff Goldblum as a fervent science teacher who's astonished, Bradford Tatum as Powder's main enemy at school, Brandon Smith as a redneck deputy who instinctively hates him, but actually fears him, and the beautiful redhead Mis…