Ballast Critic Reviews

This is the most significant feature about poor black life since Charles Burnett's 1977 "Killer of Sheep."Read the full review

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.Read the full review

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.Read the full review

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.Read the full review

Truly a winter's tale.Read the full review

Working with non-pro actors, Hammer pulls authentic performances from the trio that are at times almost too painful to witness.Read the full review

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.Read the full review

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.Read the full review

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.Read the full review