Toronto. Nothing is Private.

Alan Ball's Nothing is Private "is nothing if not controversial, but in ways that become increasingly smug as the film unspools," finds the Boston Globe's Ty Burr. "There are good movies about teenage girls and sex, but this isn't one of them."

"Ball's screenplay for Private frequently confuses depravity for dark humor, and it's hard to tell what the film is trying to say and at what points it intends to be taken seriously," writes Eric Kohn at indieWIRE.

At the Reeler, Stu VanAirsdale's critique is a bit harsher: "Think of it like Todd Solondz remaking Crash in a cul-de-sac, but with twice the tampons and a quarter of the self-respect. Ball makes Paul Haggis look like Robert Bresson. The cunt couldn't direct traffic in a two-car garage."

"The main characters are Jasira, a young Arab-American teenaged girl (Summer Bishil) and her strict, uptight Lebanese father (Peter Macdissi) living in suburban Texas at the time of the first US invasion of Iraq," explains Eugene Hernandez at indieWIRE. "Based on Alicia Erian's novel Towelhead, the film is a coming-of-age story that follows young Jasira's sexual awakening in the arms of an African-American kid at school and at the hands of racist military reservist neighbor who sexually assaults her."

"Better that the film (in all of its digitally shot cinematic flatness) is completely ignored by folks rather than coming into any type of cultural conversation," advises Kurt Halfyard at Twitch.

"Ball shows a real facility for mixing comedy and drama here, and also for delivering some keen insights about race and religion that risk offending in order to make a point," cries out the lone voice of Ryan Stewart at Cinematical. "Nothing is Private has the biting humor of American Beauty, and exhibits that same quality of the sheer bone-weariness of being an American, but skirts the ponderous, life and death stakes of that film in favor of a fast-moving, ground-level story, and the result is a success."

Posted by dwhudson at October 2, 2007 8:03 AM