The Motel.

"Like the best independent films, The Motel realizes that life is made up of minor pleasures and tiny epiphanies, not sweeping character arcs or big dramatic moments," writes Nathan Rabin at the AV Club.

"Michael Kang's modest Sundance applause reaper, doesn't deserve to be shotgunned for the sins of 30 other movies," writes Michael Atkinson. "But the underwhelming syncopation of make-nice clichés is too familiar."

Stephen Holden in the New York Times: "With a running time of only 76 minutes, The Motel knows its modest place in the cinematic scheme of things. The drama, such as it is, stems not from any conventional plot, but in the accruing of small, telling details that sustain a feeling of lives in suspension."

Earlier: Greg Pak talks with Kang and producer Karin Chien.

Updates, 7/1: Andrew O'Hehir: "All the ingredients of this coming-of-age fable are individually familiar, but you rarely see them come together so well."

For Cinematical's Martha Fischer, The Motel is "an effective, biting look at a typically dreadful childhood that leaves us both depressed and thankful that we survived those years intact."

Update, 7/2: The Reeler: Kang "eschews melodrama for a kind of weighted whimsy (Sam and Ernest leaping around a rural road shouting "I want to be happy!") and broaches assimilation only inasmuch as the motel represents a humane (if low-rent) cosmopolis."

Posted by dwhudson at June 30, 2006 9:36 AM