blackwood13

This sweet, small indie movie was very well-received at a Midwest film fest. After seeing it, I chatted with a father who brought his teenage daughter, some elderly folks, as well as gay friends, and everyone loved the way it portrayed gay men seeking romance and love in the same way that straight characters would. It's not that the experience of being gay isn't different - it certainly can be - but in the end we're all human and we want mostly the same things, such as love, respect, the ability to take care of our families and live our lives openly and as we want to live them.

The movie was charming, funny, and ultimately emotionally fulfilling. The lead character is played with empathetic charm by Nicholas Downs, and Bruce Gray is delightful as an over-the- top sentimentalist. This movie treats gay men as "ordinary people" - and that's a delight in and of itself. The twist is that it's a good old-fashioned rom-com... with two men falling in love instead of a woman and a man. Highly recommended.

It's so cool to see a movie that's about women and their lives. Acting is excellent throughout, the script is witty, and the whole movie is deeply fulfilling. Kate is a great character, a teenage girl who goes about freeing herself from her small-town constraints. It's not just about the teenagers, though, because the adults also get to grow and learn. In fact it's the relationship between Kate and Louise that is the heart of the film, one young girl wanting to stretch herself, and her older friend who remembers her own youth as she watches Kate grow and have new experiences.

Really worth seeing. The film world is full of stories of teenage boys dealing with their adolescences. I'd love to see more exploration of the stories of teenage girls, and "16 to Life" is a great one.

As a film festival director who has watched literally thousands of film submissions, both short and feature- length, it's rare that I see a film with perfect pacing, but Bright makes that grade even though its pacing is measured and deliberate. Some might describe it as slow, and yet our screening committee found it a great pleasure, in this day of frenetic films, to be able to absorb the carefully constructed imagery and to digest the dialogue. So many of those images remain in the mind's eye even a year later – the sensuous orange peel, the glowing incandescent filament of a light bulb, Robert Wisdom's inward-looking gaze. It almost goes without saying that the cast, led by Eric Nenninger, is superb; each actor digs into the meaty script and wrings subtle, deeply felt emotions from it.

Benjamin Busch has been a favorite at Landlocked Film Festival since we got to know him through his earlier (also excellent) film, Sympathetic Details. It's been a pleasure to watch his growth as a writer and director.

The extinguished filament that closes the film leaves an afterimage that transforms the film into an allegory of light and dark, fear and courage, and how we form bonds with others, drawing courage and light from them. Speaking for myself, I give it my highest recommendation as a film worth seeing and a story worth telling.