Solemplex To me, this movie is perfection.

Gutsycurene Fanciful, disturbing, and wildly original, it announces the arrival of a fresh, bold voice in American cinema.

Neive Bellamy Excellent and certainly provocative... If nothing else, the film is a real conversation starter.

Ezmae Chang This is a small, humorous movie in some ways, but it has a huge heart. What a nice experience.

Michael O'Keefe Putty Hill is a working-class neighborhood in Baltimore. The economic downturn has really hit the city hard and Putty Hill has all but turned into a skid row. Most of the young people of the area have little ambition or future to speak of. News travels fast when a young man is found dead in a vacant house; he is the victim of a heroin overdose. In spite of not being known very well, family and casual acquaintances gather for a modest funeral. The day before, young people wander the popular hangout spots and reflect on their tragic loss.Director Matthew Porterfield filmed over just a few days and relied largely on improvised interviews for this disjointed project. You really have to be in the proper mood to garner anything redeeming from PUTTY HILL. Singer Sky Ferreira is the only actor of note. Others include: Cody Ray, Zoe Vance, Walker Teiser, Catherine Evans, Virginia Heath and James Siebor Jr.

M Nissley This film has: no plot; countless, pointless, extended shots of virtually nothing happening (a guy getting a tattoo for ten minutes, a girl crying on a dark porch for eight minutes, people swimming and smoking weed, people with nothing to say driving around in the dark, etc.); no character development; and apparently no script. Take a camera, go to a poor neighborhood and film the most boring people you can find sitting around doing nothing, and you can personally recreate this waste of time disguised as film making. Apparently, this guy had $50,000 on hand to accomplish this feat. What? The backdrop for the end credits is actually more interesting than anything else in the movie (which is why I gave it a 2 instead of a 1). Well paid critics apparently like the novelty of seeing what poor people do all day, but for those who already know, this is utterly pointless.

oOgiandujaOo_and_Eddy_Merckx This is a drama about a wake that's kind of coalescing just after the death of a young man from an overdose. The cast includes ex-cons, skate-kids, dropouts, long-suffering retirees, generally low status folk sat on the sidelines of modern America doing their own thing. It's shot well enough that it looks like a documentary even though it's not. Lots of folks are interviewed about the dead guy and end up having a karaoke wake. The guys in the movie seem pretty anaesthetised most of the time, they're just trying to get along, and take things as they come.There's some nice stuff, including a memorial graffito sprayed as we watch, of the words Rest in Peace spelled out on three Japanese bridges that look like they could come from a Monet painting.At the end the film unfocuses on a road scene (an old trick) and you get all theses spheres of coloured light dripping across the screen. Like I say, an old trick, but it's done well here, and the unfocus is meaningful for this film, as the folk we see try not to focus too much, for example they go paintballing a week before the service, they just get on with it and don't mope. The wake at the end is actually fairly moving, and fleshes out the film a lot, adds meaning to some of what you see beforehand.I have a lot of love for this film, and I can see what it was trying to do, it's grown on me a lot since the night I watched it.I must warn you though that some shots are held for too long, and I'm a guy who likes long takes, furthermore there was a spalling walkout, which quite astonished me, probably the first time I've seen it happen in a film which wasn't violent, overtly sexual or confrontational. In fairness the film was shown quite late at night, and folks may well have seen several films beforehand and been tired (this was film #4 for me of the day at the Edinburgh International Film Festival).

Avery Hudson A junkie's house, a boy's death. Girls smoking in the woods. Cops on the hunt for a bank robber. Grandma is a good egg. Tagger – "Rest in Peace, Cory." A girl comes home to her estranged father's tattoo party. A karaoke wake. Visiting a dead brother's junkie lair at night. All he kept was his skateboard. The friendship of girls.Putty Hill in the Northeast of Baltimore is both urban and bucolic. A filmmaker was working a coming-of-age tale about a group of metal-heads skirting the fringes of Baltimore. It was a timely script, but financing fell through. To rescue the work of everyone involved, he shot a new film in 12 days.A triumph of salvage. Not to be missed.