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Stars indicate the most critically-acclaimed movies.
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Man on Wire
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Slumdog Millionaire
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Momma's Man
84
Christmas Tale, A
84
Happy-Go-Lucky
83
Trouble the Water
83
U2 3D
82
Tell No One
82
Rachel Getting Married
82
Frozen River
82
Let the Right One In
81
Dear Zachary: A Letter to a Son About His Father
79
Stranded: I Have Come from a Plane That Crashed on the Mountains
78
I've Loved You So Long
77
Pray the Devil Back to Hell
76
Betrayal - Nerakhoon, The
75
Pool, The
73
Girl Cut in Two, A
72
I Served the King of England
70
I.O.U.S. A
69
Ashes of Time Redux
69
Fear(s) of the Dark
68
August Evening
67
Synecdoche, New York
64
Appaloosa
63
JCVD
63
Eden
63
Changeling
62
Duchess, The
59
We Are Wizards
57
Special
57
Sixty Six
56
Religulous
55
Boy in the Striped Pajamas, The
55
What Just Happened?
54
Battle in Seattle
54
Good Dick
53
RocknRolla
51
Morning Light
50
Breakfast with Scot
47
How About You
47
Choke
46
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43
Tru Loved
43
Gardens of the Night
41
Cthulhu
40
Igor
40
Other End of the Line, The
34
My Name Is Bruce
34
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32
Repo! The Genetic Opera
31
Hounddog
30
Guitar, The
28
Fireproof
27
Lake City
26
House of the Sleeping Beauties
26
Filth and Wisdom
xx
Dostana
xx
Nobel Son
Stars indicate the most critically-acclaimed movies.
|
Ballast
Alluvial Film Co.
 |
|
MPAA RATING: Not Rated
Starring
Micheal J. Smith Sr.,
Jim Myron Ross,
Tarra Riggs,
and
Johnny McPhail
In the cold, winter light of a rural Mississippi Delta township, a man’s suicide radically transforms three characters’ lives and throws off-balance what has long been a static arrangement among them. Marlee is a single mother struggling to scratch a living for herself and James, her 12-year-old son, who has begun to stumble under drug and violence pressures. So when the opportunity to seek safe harbor at a new home arises, she grabs it, though the property is shared by Lawrence, a man with whom Marlee has feuded bitterly since James’s birth. With circumstances thrusting them into proximity, a subtle interdependence and common purpose emerge for Marlee and Lawrence as they navigate grief, test new waters, and tentatively move forward. (Alluvial Film Company)
| GENRE(S): |
Drama
|
| WRITTEN BY: |
Lance Hammer
|
| DIRECTED BY: |
Lance Hammer
|
| RELEASE DATE: |
Theatrical: October 1, 2008
|
| RUNNING TIME: |
96 minutes, Color |
| ORIGIN: |
USA |
All critic scores are converted to a 100-point scale. If a critic does not indicate a score, we assign a score based on the general impression given by the text of the review. Learn more...
100
Variety
Robert Koehler
A rock-ribbed sense of committed, personal cinema and a core belief in people being able to pull themselves out of misery supports Ballast, an extraordinary debut by editor-writer-director Lance Hammer.
100
Chicago Tribune
Michael Phillips
Ballast strikes me as one of the few American pictures of 2008 to say what it wants to say, visually and narratively, about a specific situation and part of the country, in a way that transcends regional specifics.
100
Chicago Sun-Times
Roger Ebert
Ballast inexorably grows and deepens and gathers power and absorbs us. I always say I hardly ever cry at sad films, but I sometimes do, just a little, at films about good people.
100
Boston Globe
Wesley Morris
This is the most significant feature about poor black life since Charles Burnett's 1977 "Killer of Sheep."
91
Entertainment Weekly
Owen Gleiberman
The final shot, of the three characters now united, may be the quietest affirmation of life I've ever seen in a movie, and one of the truest.
90
The New York Times
Manohla Dargis
Shot with a sure hand and a cast of unknowns, the film doesn't so much tell a story as develop a tone and root around a place that, despite the intimate camerawork, remains shrouded in ambiguity.
90
Village Voice
Elena Oumano
The conflicts, truths, and, ultimately, grace and dignity that bind these three together are brought to authentic life, without Hollywood-style exaggeration, through the quiet little miracles of performance that Hammer coaxes from his non-actors, especially the heartrending Riggs.
90
Film Threat
Jeremy C. Fox
What they produced is something that is true not just to this place or to these people's lives, or to the lives of poor people or black people, but to the experience of being human.
90
The Hollywood Reporter
Kirk Honeycutt
Working with non-pro actors, Hammer pulls authentic performances from the trio that are at times almost too painful to witness.
90
Los Angeles Times
Kenneth Turan
A quintessentially American story that unmistakably echoes European art house cinema, combining the aesthetic purity of France's Robert Bresson with the social consciousness of Belgium's Dardenne brothers. It also is a powerful, character-driven melodrama that easily holds our attention from first to last.
90
Chicago Reader
J.R. Jones
Hammer overplays his indie hand with an abrupt and unsatisfactory ending, but his three leads are so credible that their aching, tongue-tied characters linger in the memory.
88
Baltimore Sun
Chris Kaltenbach
It's a frustrating film in that its characters resolutely defy convention, and its story offers no epiphany, no one moment when everything becomes clear.
80
Wall Street Journal
Joe Morgenstern
This ostensibly simple film evokes whole lives in 96 minutes, and does so with sparse dialogue.
80
Salon.com
Andrew O'Hehir
Ballast is an audacious and ambiguous debut from a filmmaker whose motives and aims are not as transparent as they seem.
75
New York Post
Lou Lumenick
Hammer, whose blunt name belies the movie's many subtle touches, has his own distinct style. He also has an enormous trust in the audience to sort out this wounded family's miseries without the assistance of narration or even a musical score.
75
Premiere
Eric Kohn
The result is an exhilarating narrative.
75
San Francisco Chronicle
Walter Addiego
Truly a winter's tale.
75
Philadelphia Inquirer
Carrie Rickey
What this unclassifiable story may lack in decibels, it has in emotional depth. At once a mystery, a family drama, a snapshot of children at risk, Ballast is an unusually perceptive character study more eloquent in action than in dialogue.
75
The Globe and Mail (Toronto)
Rick Groen
Plot isn't what drives the picture; instead, this is a cinematic tone poem, where the dominant mood is a Faulknerian mix of sorrow and endurance.
70
Washington Post
Mike Mayo
Ballast, though, is less than completely satisfying in a dramatic sense. Events that seem to be important are dropped and left unresolved. Conflicts from the past are mentioned but never explained, as if key scenes were missing. Given that disinterest in conventional narrative techniques, the abrupt ending may be appropriate, but it feels wrong and arbitrary.
67
The Onion (A.V. Club)
Noel Murray
Hammer has a nice eye, and his premise develops engagingly in the final half hour, as he raises provocative questions about whether one man can truly step in for another.
50
Christian Science Monitor
Peter Rainer
Ballast lacks ballast. Much praised by aficionados of minimalist indie cinema – hey, who needs a plot when you've got mood? – it's a wearying slog through anomie in a Mississippi Delta township.
 The average user rating for this movie is 8.0 (out of 10) based on 2 User Votes
Note: User votes are NOT included in the Metascore calculation.
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