Audrey the Trainwreck

Frank Ross\' newest film, Audrey the Trainwreck, is at once utterly down home and completely philosophical.

An edgier Richard Linklater for a less privileged generation, mumblecore helmer Frank V. Ross captures his characters\' dead-end disaffection not through stasis, but through nervous activity.

Frank V. Ross makes no-budget, impeccably acted, dryly funny, and unpretentiously melancholic movies about the tiny gray area between happiness and misery, and the frustrations of the suburban working-class. In his latest, Audrey the Trainwreck, there is no character named Audrey, and nothing as histrionic as a trainwreck.

Frank V. Ross wrote and directed this slice of Midwestern mumblecore in a style -- overlapping dialogue, off-center compositions, a jumpy, disconnected narrative -- that suggests Robert Altman without any of Altman\'s instincts for character and poetry.