Heights

This film begins with the Glenn Close character, a famous actress who could be Close herself, giving a master class in Shakespeare to a bunch of Juilliard acting students, in which she laments the lack of passion she sees in their performances and, more broadly, in the world she inhabits. Which is a fitting, and ironic, prologue for a movie that looks at the ennui of urban lives and the emotional earthquakes that disrupt them. This is a contemporary New York character-driven drama, but it reminds me of a 1970s movie -- in a good way. There are slightly retro split screens, long-lens conversations like mid-period Woody Allen movies, and a sense of lightness in the directing style that never becomes slickness. It's also refreshing to see an independent film that doesn't completely deteriorate in the third act -- it's almost become taboo to tell a story that is satisfying in the world of independent film, because it's seen as a concession to Hollywood. But this manages to do it in a convincing way without selling out to the forces of cheesiness or convention.