The Killing of Two Lovers

Made on a micro budget, Robert Machoian’s first feature-length film is “a transfixing drama without a wasted word or a single inessential scene,” said David Rooney in The Hollywood Reporter. The writer-director shot the movie in a remote town in Utah and opens it with a breathtaking sight: a man standing in a bedroom pointing a pistol at two lovers who are unaware he’s there. Played by accomplished TV actor Clayne Crawford, this is David, a husband and father driven to desperation as his marriage slips away. An “ominous dread” hangs over everything that follows, even as David proves to be usually gentle and kind. Despite the noirish title, this arresting film is “really about the pain of marital separation, particularly when one party is pulling toward divorce and the other toward reconciliation,” said Dennis Harvey in Variety.com. “There is no question that some kind of explosion is coming,” and Machoian delivers it, though not in a way viewers will anticipate. Sepideh Moafi plays Niki, a paralegal still aspiring to a bigger life, and as the couple’s story unfolds, “the acting barely feels like acting” and “the situations are documentary-real,” said Roger Moore in RogersMovieNation .com. “Machoian never lets this lapse into melodrama,” yet “the fact that he can take such an over-familiar situation and discover surprises in it may be his most impressive feat of all.” (In select theaters or $6 on demand) R very nice movies,” said Johnny Oleksinki in the New York Post. A boy whose mother is dying goes searching for the “Water Man,” a figure of local legend who supposedly knows the secret of immortality. Oyelowo, as the tween’s father, adds depth to the story, but it plays mostly as standard young adult fiction, except “watered down.” (In theaters only) PG