Tim Blake Nelson

We see two stories told over four time lines, which wind down to a devastating ground zero collision, as we watch a double tragedy unfold in a small Oklahoma town. The two stories are told out of normal time sequence, showing us brief glimpses of the beginning, middle and end of the two stories in seemingly random order. One story concerns Ainsley DuPree, who meets and marries her prison pen pal Jack. The other story begins with the discovery of a mute and bloody teenager, found wandering and in shock in the middle of the night, and the efforts of the town sheriff to determine what happened to him. As the film unfolds these tales, the viewer is confronted with questions of the existence and mercy of God and the hopelessness of being alone and adrift in an indifferent world.Read More »

At once brutally realistic and highly theatrical, Tim Blake Nelson’s screen version of his play “The Grey Zone” may well evoke the mechanized horror in the bowels of the Nazi death camps more vividly than any fictional film to date.

But its staccato, Mamet-style dialogue exchanges, breathless pacing and remarkably healthy, well-fed-looking actors create a cumulative sense of artificiality that seriously undercuts the devastating effect clearly being sought in this fictionalized dramatization of the only organized uprising ever attempted by the prisoners at Auschwitz.

Laudably avoiding cheap sentimentality and phony heroics in its aggressive investigation of an all-but-impossible moral quandary, this is a relentless, hard-edged, tough-minded picture that, even with supportive reviews, faces an uphill commercial struggle upon planned release by Lions Gate next spring.Read More »