Margaret

Hollywood doesn’t produce too many movies like this, and when it does, it doesn’t know what to do with them. Playwright Kenneth Lonergan’s long-awaited, troubled follow up to You Can Count On Me is a volcanic, raw, turbulent drama that went unreleased for six years (it was shot in 2005).

Seventeen-year-old Lisa (Anna Paquin, from True Blood) is rocked with guilt after a woman is killed in a traffic accident (she had inadvertently distracted the driver). But that’s only one thread in a teeming social tapestry this intense, passionate teen must negotiate as she comes of age in a time of contradiction and confusion.

Wildly ambitious… embraces big and rich themes and sumptuous tones and moods with a remarkable scope and nuance… For all its awkwardness and uncertainty, the film is a city symphony, romantic yet scathing, lyrical with street life and vaulting skylines, reckless with first adventure, and awed by the abstractions, both intellectual and poetic, on which the great machine runs.

Richard Brody, The New Yorker

Bursts with ambition and specificity… Paquin deserves the highest accolades for her ferociously committed performance…The film has a cumulative power – solidified by a devastating opera-house finale – that’s staggering. This is frayed-edges filmmaking at its finest.

Keith Uhlich, Time Out New York

Ambitious, affecting, unwieldy and haunting, it’s an eccentric, densely atmospheric, morally hyper-aware masterpiece.

Ann Hornaday, Washington Post

Paquin creates that rarest of things: a profoundly unsympathetic character who is mysteriously, mesmerically, operatically compelling to watch.

Peter Bradshaw, The Guardian