Reviews
Your Reviews
This is a beautiul moving film. It is nice to see a film with African American characters who though troubled are not to be pitied nor are they... otypical caricatures. The acting is real and the setting is wonderfully filmed. Full Review
December 28,2008
Dmawi1
Critic Reviews
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.Full Review
Roger Ebert
Chicago Sun-Times
This is the most significant feature about poor black life since Charles Burnett's 1977 "Killer of Sheep."Full Review
Wesley Morris
Boston Globe
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.Full Review
Robert Koehler
Variety
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.Full Review
Owen Gleiberman
Entertainment Weekly
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.Full Review
Kenneth Turan
Los Angeles Times
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