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Verdict: A heart- warming film designed to bore the whole family.

Details: Starring Peter Coyote and Karen Allen. Rated PG. 1 hour, 44 minutes.

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Review: There's a big market for films the whole family can go to. So it's a shame that the basketball drama "The Basket" shoots and misses the net. For a movie built around a love of hoop shots, it builds to a climactic Big Game that unfolds with all the excitement of melting cheese.

Set in 1918 in rural Washington state, Basket has more on its mind than passes and dribbles.

The movie centers on German orphans Helmut (Robert Karl Burke) and his older sister Brigitta (Amber Willenborg), sent to a foster home in a small farming community, where the locals -- reeling from the loss of loved ones fighting overseas -- view them with suspicion or outright hostility. The worst of these is farmer Nicholas (Jock MacDonald), whose son has come home ill and missing a leg.

The new schoolteacher, Martin Conlon (Peter Coyote), also courts trouble by playing snippets of a German opera to his class every day. But he also introduces the newfangled leather sphere he calls a basketball, and coaches the boys in a sport that, natch, will prove to be the great equalizer between Germans and Yanks. (If you can't guess who will turn out to be the star player, you must have never seen a movie.)

"The Basket" also throws in a brewing romance between Brigitta and Tom (Eric Dane), who is naturally a son of the German-hating Nicholas. And Nicholas' wife Bessie (a largely wasted Karen Allen) shows spunk by offering to sew costumes for Coyote's team, against Nicholas' wishes.

Lessons are learned, prejudices are overcome, blah blah blah.

The movie is harmless, but hopelessly dull, shot in brownish hues that mute even the gorgeous rolling landscape. And composer Don Caron (one of the movie's four co-writers) drowns nearly every scene in syrupy waves of sentiment.

— Steve Murray, Cox News Service

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