Putty Hill Reviews
Antagony & Ecstasy
Porterfield's ingenious structural choices and the film's exemplary sense of place... [are] only enough to make the film tolerable.
Full Review
| Original Score: 6/10
Top CriticPoints must be awarded for nerve, but virtually every aspect of this misbegotten film misfires.
Film Journal International
Imagine Gummo without the bizarre humor and you have Putty Hill.
Capital Times (Madison, WI)
The fatal misstep, I think, is his decision to ask the characters questions from off camera, documentary style, so characters look directly into the camera to answer.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2/4
Laramie Movie Scope
While this film could win some kind of award for getting the most out of a limited budget, the low budget of the film is a handicap that isn't fully overcome. It is an experimental film that works part of the time and fails part of the time.
Full Review
| Original Score: C
New York Press
Gnomic imagery like this is an arty-artifice, based in sociological condescension.
NYC Film Critic
In its low-key way, Putty Hill effectively shows how tragedy can unite young people that are otherwise disconnected from their community. Watching it though, I too often felt disconnected from the movie.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2.5/4
It looks closely, burrows deep, considers the way in which lives have become pointless and death therefore less meaningful.
Full Review
| Original Score: 4/4
With "Putty Hill," Porterfield joins the company of American indie directors Ramin Bahrani and Kelly Reichardt, filmmakers often compelled to seek out everyday souls in their textured, oh-so quotidian environs.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/4
Times-Picayune
It's a film for patient moviegoers. But for those moviegoers, it stands to be a rewarding experience.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/4
Digs deep beneath the surface of the quiet doings of everyday people to get at the solid roots that bind them to one another and to home.
A quietly wrenching art film shot like a documentary, "Putty Hill" is a deeply felt evocation of a place and a people by writer-director Matt Porterfield...
Full Review
| Original Score: 3.5/4
Financial Times
Place: Baltimore. Style: mumblecore.
Full Review
| Original Score: 4/5
Projection Booth
Whether it's the joyously impromptu screech of a surprised girl or the dead-end escape that concludes the film, Putty Hill's slice of life is bittersweet indeed.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3.5/5
Porterfield's rejection of obvious irony makes this not only a warm film, but one which shows the real face of America's poor, young and disenfranchised.
Full Review
| Original Score: 4/5
Spirituality and Practice
A creative and risky blend of a character-driven drama and a documentary about some alienated working-class people in a slummy suburb of Baltimore.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/5
Ozus' World Movie Reviews
We are given a realistic impression of America's disenfranchised young.
Full Review
| Original Score: B
Matt Porterfield's moody, elliptical fusion of fiction and documentary, slips back and forth between the forms with a stealth that dissolves one into the other.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3.5/5
This curious blend of documentary and narrative, held together less by any plot device than by a rigorous aesthetic, proves all the more effective for being in service of casual naturalism.
Filmcritic.com
unquestionably the best American film I've seen thus far this year
Full Review
| Original Score: 4/5
