3 Backyards: Critic Reviews

Little is left to chance, and every detail contributes to a tightly schematic, microcosmic poetic concept.

A story in which poor real folks are granted perspective only by brushing up against starlets, accidents, and villains of the tabloid press.

The movie has none of the smugness of American Beauty: You could dream of living in a world like this.

Mendelsohn's dialogue is, for the most part, as spare as poetry, and the three stories are woven together masterfully and acquire a gleaming aura that's almost pastoral.

My mind kept wandering.

Well-acted and acutely observed, the sort of cerebral fare you can more typically find on HBO than in theaters these days.

This dark, well-acted suburban tale is follow-up to the gifted Mendleson's most promising feature debut

And although Mendelsohn maintains a certain cool detachment, he also allows the film to occasionally soar in unexpected ways.

Mendelsohn may believe he's presenting an unvarnished look at middle-class America, but if these kinds of people exist, you won't recognize them.

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.

It may not be the Long Island the natives are more accustomed to, but that sense of place from a prism of both wonderment and despair, is deep into the moment of those physical and human worlds alike, playing out sensually and emotionally in suburbia.

Three lives intersect over the course of a fall day in Long Island in Eric Mendelsohn's dazzling and delicate independent drama 3 Backyards.

Tries to give suburban malaise a fresh spin with dreamlike visuals and overbearing music.

At once lyrical and mysterious, familiar yet enigmatic...It's a movie that raises more questions than it answers. It leaves you feeling haunted and touched.

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

An exquisitely observed slice-of-life with a genuinely transporting feel for its setting. Sumptuously dreamlike and compellingly elusive.

Mendelsohn refuses to satirize suburbia, or to take it too seriously. What he does do is present very real souls who just happen to live in this kind of community with compassion and understanding.