Every year some over-hyped award-laden independent film faces a critical backlash, dissenting writers who cry it ain’t all that. This year it’s Ballast. To quote Armond White, from the NY Press:

“Director-writer Lance Hammer shows a black Mississippi family torn apart by a double suicide attempt, drugs and alienation. But you have to see through these ludicrous black phantoms to the actual white middle-class fantasies at the film’s core.”

Maybe “backlash” is a strong term for a handful of disgruntled critics, but I detect a similar sense of unrest in the audience.

The second time I saw Ballast, I dragged a friend along to Manhattan’s Film Forum (where it recently closed after a brief run). I told her that this film was everything I had been arguing for in American cinema (mostly on internet message boards, in my drawers—sad, really): Its angelic patience, its reverence for faces, silences and subjective experience (with more watchful over-the-shoulder shots than a ‘Nam combat doc) could teach American audiences how to look and listen again. Second time around, I was able to appreciate these qualities even more, as the story became fairly transparent, cleverly delineated though it was. Second time around, it was all about the beauty.

I suspect it was the story that had some of the folks in the Film Forum audience sighing, whispering and even snickering uncontrollably. Story-wise, Ballast can be easily mistaken for an entry in the Why We Be Black genre—films which depict underclass African-Americans scratching and surviving and tearing each other apart. Such films are said to exist mainly for the delectation of white liberals who like to think of poor blacks as lovable to the degree that they are irrational, impulsive and self-destructive. Mighty Joe Young in a do-rag. The fallacy of placing Ballast in this genre is as tragic as the critical backlash against Steven Spielberg’s The Color Purple adaptation, which reduced that film’s towering humanism to Song of the South T-N-T.

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Shotgun Stories, the impressively accomplished feature debut of writer/director Jeff Nichols, has a few obvious affinities with the directorial work of its producer, David Gordon Green. Beyond the fact that both filmmakers have a demonstrated interest in the personal tragedies of working class families in the small-town South, much of the commonality lies in the aesthetic sense that Green has been fairly accused of adopting from Terrence Malick. But if Shotgun’s courting of visual pleasure via deliberate pacing and a certain transluscent golden glow fail to reinvent the wheel, at least credit Nichols with picking the seconds that suit the material. A lyrical story of feuding familial factions in Southern Arkansas, Shotgun gets off to a slow, quirk-leavened start, but as a seemingly minor character morphs from grating comic relief to major catalyst for action, the film gains weight and eventually snowballs into an undeniably affecting moral tragedy.

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Open up your “Movies I Want to See” list at Spout and get ready to add these–indieWIRE’s top 10 from Tribeca. (If you were lucky enough to catch them at Tribeca or another festival, you can write some reviews and let us know if you agree with indieWIRE’s assessment.) Here are the films, and you can read the whole article here. The Reeler also reviewed many of these films for Spout, so check out the links.

1. We Are Together (directed by Paul Taylor)

2. The Gates (directed by Antonio Ferrera and Albert Maysles)

3. 2 Days in Paris (directed by Julie Delpy)

4. Shotgun Stories (directed by Jeff Nichols)

5. In Search of a Midnight Kiss (directed by Alex Holdridge)

6. Rebirth of a Nation (by DJ Spooky)

7. Chavez (directed by Diego Luna)

8. I Am an American Soldier: One Year in Iraq With the 101st Airborne (directed by John Laurence)

9. Half Moon (directed by Bahman Ghobadi)

10. Times and Winds (directed by Reha Erdem)