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Little Accidents director Sara Colangelo with Anne-Katrin Titze on casting Elizabeth Banks: "I had seen her in W and I loved her in the role of Laura Bush." Photo: Anne-Katrin Titze

On a bitterly cold evening following a sold out opening night screening in New York at Cinema Village's #1 theater of Sara Colangelo's smartly woven Little Accidents, starring Elizabeth Banks, Boyd Holbrook, Jacob Lofland, Josh Lucas, Chloë Sevigny with Beau Wright, Alexia Rasmussen and James DeForest Parker, I spoke with the director and producers Anne Carey and Summer Shelton and the enthusiastic audience joined in.

Jacob Lofland as Owen: "In the case of Owen's storyline, you might feel the horror of it more standing back."

As we were waiting for the screening to conclude, Sara mentioned to me Mike Nichols' Silkwood, Atom Egoyan's The Sweet Hereafter and John Ford's How Green Was My Valley as inspirations.

Casualties of Class War: Colangelo’s Well Performed, Soporific Debut

The directorial debut of Sara Colangelo, Little Accidents, finds a filmmaker afforded the possibility to expand an intriguing short film into a feature length endeavor only to end up with a curiously hollow, naggingly underwhelming result. That’s not to say this is generally the case or to place this title within any sort of overarching trend in American independent cinema, but short film formatting doesn’t always allow or necessitate for more in depth analysis. Featuring several performances worth lauding, Colangelo’s script congeals into a mush of predictable beats and rhythms once it establishes the zenith of its dramatic tension early on, meant to catalyze a series of intersecting ripples careening throughout the numbed lives of its rural denizens, where the haves and have-nots are equally hardnosed, everyone equipped with blinders as to the needs, thoughts, or feelings of their fellow citizens.

In a blue-collar, West Virginia town, a mining accident kills 10 workers in the dusty pits and leaves several members of its community coughing up grief and despair. The townsfolk, frustrated and starting to point their fingers at the hasty corporate management, all have to grapple with the tragedy and try to restore feelings of normalcy. The set-up for Little Accidents, the debut feature for writer/director Sara Colangelo, hints at building a tense conflict between the various residents altered by the event. However, despite terrific work from a good ensemble of character actors, the film never achieves either the complexity or the rising tension its premise promises.

What does work is the drama’s specificity. Colangelo shot the film in a West Virginia mining town and even used a coal mine as a major set. (Several shots of the mine show big piles of ash covering up a hole, an...

The first trailer has arrived for Little Accidents. Sara Colangelo makes her directorial debut with this stirring drama, which stars Elizabeth Banks, Josh Lucas and Chlo&#235 Sevigny. An intimate portrait of a small town in shambles, the story tracks one desperate mother's search for her son.

When a teenage boy goes missing in a small town already devastated by a fatal mining accident, three strangers find themselves drawn together in a tangle of secrets, lies, and the collective grief of the community. Reeling from the disappearance of her son, Diane (Elizabeth Banks) finds herself drifting away from her husband (Josh Lucas), a mining company executive whose role in the accident has made her family the prime target for the town's anger.

When she forms a dangerous bond with the sole survivor of the disaster (Boyd Holbrook), truths will be uncovered that threaten to tear apart the few remaining threads holding...