Directed by Matt Porterfield
(Not Rated)
Subscribe to The Week
Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.
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.
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.
-
August 23 editorial cartoonsCartoons Saturday's political cartoons include deficit dimness, steamroller-in-chief, and more
-
5 museum-grade cartoons about Trump's Smithsonian purgeCartoons Artists take on institutional rebranding, exhibit interpretation, and more
-
Settling the West Bank: a death knell for a Palestine state?In the Spotlight The reality on the ground is that the annexation of the West Bank is all but a done deal
