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Critics Consensus: No consensus yet.
Critic Consensus: No consensus yet.
View All Yelling to the Sky News
All Critics (10) | Top Critics (7) | Fresh (4) | Rotten (6)
This is grim, bleak material that at times is monotonous, but its woe feels authentic.
Not much happens in story terms, but the film swirls with emotions that make it by turns grim and amusing, heavy and light, obvious and vague.
Mahoney barely explains her characters' circumstances, which makes the movie obliquely intriguing. But whenever the story comes into focus, it's revealed as fairly conventional.
"Yelling" is a prosaic look at a hard life. Like Sweetness, the movie finds its way by instinct.
Little more than a résumé film for all involved, it certainly feels more Park City than Bushwick.
Yelling to the Sky drips with a strange but sometimes moving nostalgia for environs its characters clearly want to escape.
The film avoids most of its genre's pratfalls, though it also shows little interest in transcending them.
Even though 'Yelling to the Sky' tumbles, Victoria Mahoney shows great promise as a director.
Though the film and its director undoubtedly have a great deal of heart and passion, too many scenes feel like actors' workshop exercises.
Strong on texture but taxingly light on narrative.
If every family is each unhappy in their own unique way, then the O'Hara family has hit the jackpot. First, Ola(Antonique Smith) and Sweetness(Zoe Kravitz) have to face bullies on the way home from school, before having to suffer under the hand of their abusive and alcoholic father(Jason Clarke), as their mother(Yolonda Ross) is pretty much catatonic. And then Ola gets pregnant which takes her away from her sister. So to recap. We have bullying, alcoholism, physical abuse, mental illness, and teenage pregnancy. Did I leave anything out? Wait, there's also drug abuse, yet to come. In other words, with "Yelling to the Sky," there is just one awful and miserable situation without any kind of plot or story to really speak of. So, that just goes to show you how good an actor Jason Clarke really is, as he gives a master tutorial on how to build a character out of absolutely nothing. And I have never been so glad to see Tim Blake Nelson in anything before this.
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