Room

For a film about looking for a sign, looking for solace, Room quite brazenly offers neither. It isn't an easy film, but the world's already got plenty of easy and easily digestible films.

The plot of the indie feature Room is, shall we say, sketchy. But that's a minor annoyance thanks to a gutsy performance by Cyndi Williams and vibrating cinematography by P.J. Raval.

Winner of the John Cassavetes Award for Best Feature Under $500K at the 2006 Independent Spirit Awards, Henry's film is beautifully shot and extraordinarily well acted by Williams.

One of those rare American indies that confidently and successfully propose their own narrative logic, drawing viewers into a mental puzzle that may not contain a single clear solution.

A perceptive, unsettling psychodrama marking the assured feature writing and directing debut of shorts filmmaker Kyle Henry.

Packs a punch in its first act with a passionate lead performance by Cyndi Williams and a painfully concrete sense of modern life closing in. But gradually it slips into the indie paradigm of an alienated soul rushing into darkness, climaxing with a semiabstract montage sequence that's more rhetorical than dramatic.

Williams does a fine job with her role. I was pulling for her throughout her dreary journey. It's too bad it didn't get anywhere.