Stephen Holden’s New York Times review of Quiet City is extremely favorable towards the film, and extremely skeptical of what he calls “the movie genre labeled mumblecore … a filmmaking sensibility, filtered through Jean-Luc Godard and John Cassavetes and distantly related to punk, with the spirit of defiance replaced by resignation to the art of diminished expectations.”

This would seem to stand in sharp contrast to Matt Zoller Seitz’ Hannah Takes the Stairs review of a week ago, which was lukewarm on the film itself (”snappy but unadventurous,” he called it), but generally enthusiastic about its place within an exciting wave of American independent film. Still, both critics say the party’s over. Seitz blames Hollywood for luring these artists away:

Hannah plays like an incidental swan song, a signpost marking the point when mumblecore became a nostalgic label rather than a present-tense cultural force, and its most acclaimed practitioners moved on to bigger things. Mr. Swanberg’s third movie is a graduation photo in motion: D.I.Y., class of ’07.

Holden, apparently less invested than part-time filmmaker Seitz in championing grassroots filmmaking on principle, blames the movies:

The mumblecore genre, with its minimalist aesthetics, minuscule budgets, home-movie casting of friends and acquaintances and its fly-on-the-wall, quasi-documentary spontaneity, is so wide-open for parody that it is a sitting duck for the most withering send-up. Quiet City is fortunate to arrive just before the inevitable demolition crews arrive to tear it to shreds. Tender and sad, it is a fully realized work of mumblecore poetry.

One review commends a film for its place within an ephemeral cultural moment; another review praises a different film in spite of its relation to the same moment. It’s the second review that I’m more interested in, as lately I find I have nothing left to say about these movies in relation to one another and can only consider each film at all if I do so on its own terms. I’m off to the 2:30 show of Quiet City in an attempt to do just that; I’ll post some notes when I come back.