Runoff

Promising work that's worth checking out.

The low energy pace and performances strive for naturalism but just don't achieve compelling tension or suspense.

This isn't a perfect movie... But I can say without hesitation that if you want to be able to say you were there when a great American filmmaker's career kicked off, you need to see Runoff.

The 90-minute movie is a tightly compressed exploration of forces that make it next to impossible to operate a small business when a voracious corporation moves in for the kill.

Even when Levin's symbolism is a little on the nose, these elements are balanced with enough small details and moments that they blend in to the larger texture of the characters' lives.

The movie achieves an understated resonance through Levin's emotionally sensitive compositions and her clued-in portrayal of life in a middle-American farming community.

Levin dares something practically unheard of in modern Hollywood movies: she asks the audience to watch, feel, and come to their own conclusions.

A little too reluctant to take a stand against chemicals but worth seeing for its empathy for its main character who is forced to carry out a crime that puts her in league with Monsanto.

An intelligent, sophisticated and mesmerizing slow-burn thriller that's grounded in humanism. Patient viewers will be rewarded the most.

Truly, Runoff can be an uncomfortable film to watch -- both because Levin's subject matter is supposed to make us uncomfortable and because her film leaves so much untended, is in the end so uneven.

This emotionally affecting film never loses sight of the ethical complexity of forsaking a community in the name of an individual.

Intelligent and entertaining, Runoff moves its audience from what was perhaps a vague, wistful notion of the rural existence of family farming to witness the harsh realities of a tragically disappearing American way of life