Putty Hill

Directed by Matt Porterfield

(Not Rated)

***

The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up

This small-budget movie from a Baltimore-area filmmaker offers “a stark blast of realism,” said Kyle Smith in the New York Post. Set in a working-class neighborhood just outside that city, the film quietly observes a circle of friends and family as they deal with the glum aftermath of a young man’s untimely death by overdose. The deceased is fictional, but the cast in this “largely improvised” movie are mostly just real-life locals playing themselves. Director Matt Porterfield’s “moody, elliptical” blend of fiction and documentary creates an “impressionistic portrait of a place and its residents,” said Stephen Holden in The New York Times. He’s less interested in telling a story than in plunking us down in an exurban fringe community characterized by “stasis, downward mobility, and lowered expectations.” Putty Hill’s roundabout structure may be “an homage to the dead-end lives of Baltimore’s beleaguered,” said Ella Taylor in NPR.org. It also, however, highlights Porterfield’s “stubborn unwillingness”—and perhaps his inability—to weave his powerful raw materials into a story.