Sundance. Savage Grace.

"Savage Grace is a quiet stunner, a reserved but engrossing psychodrama whose cumulative impact is devastating," writes Sam Adams in the Philadelphia City Paper. It "builds to a series of incidents that would seem outrageous in another context. But without relying on reductive foreshadowing or pat psychobabble, [Tom] Kalin and screenwriter Howard Rodman earn the movie's final scenes, when what has seemed like a poisoned take on Edith Wharton suddenly becomes something out of Edgar Allan Poe."

"One of the more controversial films at Sundance, Savage Grace dramatizes the real-life story of Barbara and Tony Baekeland, a bizarrely intertwined high-society mother and son whose Oedipal relationship ended in tragedy," writes Kim Voynar at Cinematical. "Tom Kalin, whose prior film Swoon re-told the 1924 Leopold and Loeb murder case, seems fascinated by exploring these unusual true-crime type stories, and Savage Grace, while frequently difficult to watch because of the nature of the storyline, is both intense and fascinating."

"I didn't love the movie, but I admired its precise dialogue - a lot of ingeniously worded lines like, 'My French reading skills are not what they will be,' and, 'She would've been happy to know that you would've been there' - and it gets absorbingly creepy in the final half hour," writes Noel Murray at the AV Club. "It's one of the few films I've seen at this festival that feels like an original."

"Howard A Rodman passes for the 'it' scribe of Sundance's opening days, as writer and co-producer on two debuts at Sundance, August, directed by Austin Chick (XX/XY, Sundance 2002), and Savage Grace, the welcome return of Tom Kalin to feature-making." And Ray Pride talks with him.

And so does the Oregonian's Shawn Levy.

Earlier: Reviews from Cannes.

Posted by dwhudson at January 31, 2008 6:41 AM