The storyline is direct and the characters well-sketched. The film revolves around the impact of a suicide on the family of a convenience store owner.

| Mar 5, 2021

This moving debut effort combines edgy camerawork, a stark story and a cast of inspired non-professionals.

| Jun 2, 2020

Ballast packs a punch and its raw, visceral quality is hard to forget.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Dec 24, 2018

Its sense of space and time contains not only sadness and boredom, but something more curious, the resilience of newly born hope, like a slender green spike emerging out of the soil.

| Aug 22, 2017

Ballast, if anything, is spellbound by location, and we all know what a spell will do.

| Jun 14, 2016

Full Review | Original Score: 3/5 | Nov 18, 2011

| Original Score: 4/5 | Nov 17, 2011

Worth seeing as an example of the lengths to which a filmmaker will go to establish his career - but don't ever mistake it for sociology.

| Aug 15, 2011

His brilliant "Ballast" was as much a hit in Seattle as it was at Sundance.

| Jul 29, 2011

With debut director Lance Hammer admirably holding on to his core values in a way that directors too easy to deliver a crowd-pleaser do not, this is a fine, low-budget independent film...

| Original Score: 3/5 | May 12, 2011

Hammer manages to do enough with his actors and his nuanced script to make this exploration of the way even disparate people can provide stability for one another seem surprisingly engaging.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Apr 10, 2011

The opening half hour is electrifying, the ending interestingly open-ended...

| Mar 22, 2011

A hugely impressive, distinctive directorial debut and a compellingly humanist window onto a layer of American society that mainstream cinema likes to pretend doesn't exist.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Mar 21, 2011

This airy, quiet meditation on the struggle of three people to transcend abject poverty and unexpected loss will likely play as too dialled-down for many tastes, but persevering with it will reveal a rare, peculiar mystical quality...

Full Review | Original Score: 3/5 | Mar 20, 2011

| Original Score: 4/5 | Mar 19, 2011

Quite a debut here from writer-director Lance Hammer, working on a minuscule budget in the Mississippi Delta, and evoking a memorably forlorn kind of regional specificity.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Mar 18, 2011

| Original Score: 4/5 | Mar 18, 2011

Naturalistic performances from a non-professional cast add to the austere integrity and touching humanity of this bleak tale.

| Mar 17, 2011

This is a director who understands that a whisper can be as powerful as a shout, and in its own quiet way, Ballast is a stunning achievement.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Mar 17, 2011

A difficult, subdued film, but intelligent and with more intricacy and subtlety than at first appears.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Mar 17, 2011