Blue Car

There's nothing flashy about Moncrieff's filmmaking, and there doesn't need to be: from the start, she gets the emotional details right, and the viewer feels intimately engaged with the young protagonist. It's a powerful, fresh, honest debut.

Worth watching for the coming-out party of Agnes Bruckner, a relative newcomer who shows her mettle with an extraordinary performance in this very ordinary tear-jerker.

An impressive first effort from Ms. Moncrieff, but the eternal Aristotelian in me finds it depressing to watch characters always walking around in moral quicksand.

Margaret Colin is excellent as the harried mother, making desperate and perhaps humiliating efforts to win promotion, unable to pay sufficient attention to her two daughters, alternately angry and tender.