3 Backyards

Indulgent, uninvolving, and contrived with a highly irritating and unusually discordant score that makes you feel like it's building towards something big when there's really no narrative payoff.

Unlike those indie directors whose feel-good, P.C. claptrap predictably gets praised by the very people it flatters, Mendelsohn makes suburban poetry that opposes the way middle-class film culture likes to fantasize itself.

Mostly just a boring examination of several mundane lives with nothing really much to say about anything. The build up keeps going forward but in the end nothing ever happens, and nothing ever gets explained. To sum it up, this is pretty much just stupid, boring and pointless. I can't understand why they wanted to make this movie, or what the heck they were trying to say.

"Eric Mendelsohn's first film since 1999's Judy Berlin suggests Little Children as helmed by a nature documentarian." - Ed Gonzalez

A suburban ennuiaganza gratifyingly unlike any other, due in large part to a highly stylized co-ordination of visuals & music that was ill-received all around, if received at all, but which clicked with me immediately. I was reminded less of other movies than certain ostensibly realist fiction whose realism is regenerated by thrilling and unruly language, like Leonard Michaels or especially Joy Williams, in whose work these characters would be right at home. Adventurous filmmaking with mystery.