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

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

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

| Mar 22, 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

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

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

Sags in the final third, but the impeccable craftsmanship keeps matters afloat.

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

Drugs, guns, attempted suicide. The Mississippi Delta is a watercolour landscape in duns and half-colours. Black poverty is turned over like the underside of the American dream.

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

Although the film never fulfils the promise of its elliptical, mysterious opening - the drama occasionally lacks momentum as it proceeds towards some sort of resolution - there's no denying its intelligence, compassion and assurance.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Mar 16, 2011

It puts the 'blue' into bluegrass, but finds plenty of uplift and emotion too. Excellent.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Mar 14, 2011

Debut writer/director Lance Hammer has rendered [Ballast] with something that can only be called radiant austerity.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Nov 21, 2008

This ostensibly simple film evokes whole lives in 96 minutes, and does so with sparse dialogue.

| Nov 21, 2008

This is a cinematic tone poem, where the dominant mood is a Faulknerian mix of sorrow and endurance...

| Original Score: 3/4 | Nov 21, 2008

What this unclassifiable story may lack in decibels, it has in emotional depth.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Nov 14, 2008

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.

| Original Score: C | Nov 7, 2008

This austere, rigorous film has a sense of place, a feeling for reality so compelling it makes us feel like we're living it, not just watching on a screen.

| Original Score: 4.5/5 | Nov 7, 2008

Ballast is an impressive first feature.

| Nov 6, 2008

The movie is a beacon of independent filmmaking, not simply because Hammer opted more or less to self-distribute it, but because it's evident that we're a million miles away from Hollywood.

| Original Score: 4/4 | Oct 31, 2008

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.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/4 | Oct 31, 2008

A film that has, for lack of a less overused critical phrase, haunted me since I saw it. There's a deep sadness in Lawrence, Marlee, and James' eyes that is very hard to shake.

| Oct 31, 2008