The Year Between

A quirky tale about a girl with mental ilness, living at home with her family, basically going through the motions of dealing with all the highs and lows of everyday life.

The good: I love movies about misfits, people who dont belong, are out of place. This is such a story, and it starts out promising, because there is nothing more amusing to watch then someone behaving inappropiately ALL the time.

The bad: however, I was expecting a bit more drama and quite a bit more serious character development. Now the main character is stuck in a quirky stereotype.

Definitely not a bad movie, but somehow finally lacking in true drama.

Sobbed, laughed, hugged my mother when it ended. The kind of film that makes you love indie moviemaking. :]]]]]]]]]]] alex the director and star is such a talent and the performances are phenomenal.

The trailer did just enough to make this seem interesting. On top of being borderline bipolar myself, theTribeca laurel and Steve Buscemi sold it. Sadly this (The Family Stone Sans Christmas) missed the mark. The problem with these biopics is the writer often thinks no one else could possibly play the lead and they destroy the thing they worked so hard to build. A great lesson to young film makers out there, don't cast yourself if you're also going to direct it. The directing was also flawed, same old boring choices and settling for shocking blocking rather than getting actually creative with shots.

The dialogue however wasn't bad at all and at times there were a few laughs. I hope the writer will learn to hand off their next project to an actual director on the next outing.

Normally a girl with mental illness would just develop an eating disorder or cut herself or start a drug addiction. Not funny! In this movie however, the girl awkwardly tells everyone about her problems and generally makes everyone around her uncomfortable. She has a knack for being overly blunt, crude, and truthful. She makes poor decisions and then just goes with it and makes even worse decisions. Her life is completely messed up and she just embraces that. You can never be sure from the dialogue whether she likes or hates the person in front of her. Is this dark humor or just hilarious? You will know in the first 60 seconds if this movie is for you.

The lead is so incredible (well the whole cast is honestly) but so realistic, this is very much like real life, and I was really blown away and how true it all felt. It can be a bit heavy of course, it's not a light hearted comedy, but it has a lot of humor in it for sure. For anyone who has gone through hell in college, struggled with mental illness or just the pain of life and family (so all of us) this really feels on point. The lead is so good in this, I never saw an actor acting for even a minute, I felt like this is a real life person going through it the entire time I was watching this movie.