Lamystique3 The script is only good as the actors and the actors were above average. They showed passion and emotion through their characterization and was able to present real-life empathy in their situations. I am surprised this movie didn't make it into the box office and if it did, it was purely underrated. The story line also exhibited a common scenario that many families deal with regarding incarceration of loved ones. I can watch this movie multiple times and still feel the realness of the actors' life story. Also, many ladies deal with their husbands and boyfriends behind bars and it's a constant battle with one's self too either rock it out with them or just move on.

calvinnme The couple involved seem like a typical middle class couple. She is a registered nurse with plans to go to medical school. Her husband - I don't think the film ever mentions his legitimate profession. But he is at the beginning of an eight year sentence in a federal penitentiary for gun running.When we first meet the young couple they are talking in the visiting room at the prison. You can touch and embrace when you first meet, but NO KISSING! She is trying to encourage him. She will put her plans on hold so she can talk to him every night and see him every weekend. She tells him to keep one phrase in his head "five years good time", the shortest sentence he can do if he just stays out of trouble. Since the gun running was his only run in with the law, she figures this is a piece of cake. But it isn't.So much of the film is just the camera pointed at the wife - her face is so expressive you almost don't need words. You see the daily ennui of her life. You see her dealing with her dysfunctional relatives, doing a job she is good at - registered nurse - but wanting more, going through papers she has neatly filed away readying for his release. And then some good news. After just four years there will be a parole hearing. At first their original lawyer says she is not available. The truth is she wants half of the money upfront. This is just like a lawyer. They want to sweep unpleasant confrontations based on capitalism under the rug, but Ruby (the wife) gets the truth out of the lawyer, and gets her to agree to appear at the parole hearing. Ruby manages to scrape together the money the attorney wants.The parole hearing is a disaster. Apparently Ruby's husband Derek has been involved in one assault and is named as the instigator in a second. Then comes what Ruby was not prepared to hear. Derek has been sexually involved with a now fired female guard. We never see or even hear Derek's side of things. His lawyer just keeps mentioning "no charges were ever filed" as Derek's defense. It's artful how the film lets the audience fill in what happened. Here is a middle class guy, with probable minimal street smarts, among men who probably did not get here by dropping out of Sunday school. So his parole hearing is basically civilized people in civilized society measuring Derek's behavior in prison by civilized standards when prison is the law of the jungle.This is where the actress playing Ruby should have won an Academy Award. With just the expression on her face, at the parole hearing, she goes from the optimism of somebody about to greet someone returning from a long journey, to the dazed face of someone who realizes she has endured four years of deferred dreams and celibacy for somebody she might not even know anymore. Her face falls like a cake in an oven. Hey, if Luise Rainer could get Best Actress in 1936 for what amounts to one phone call in "The Great Ziegfeld", what about this?? The next time Ruby and Derek meet - and it is a few weeks - Ruby is a changed woman. She has a harder look on her face, and even a harder looking hairdo. Before she has been all smiles - almost angelic in appearance. Not anymore. What transpired since the parole hearing? What does she tell Derek? I'll let you watch and find out. Highly recommended.

eurograd It is always refreshing to see good indie movies exploring dark themes in a sensitive and almost lyric way. These are, incidentally, the two major strong points of this movie.There are many titles, some rather good ones, exploring incarceration an its effects on the person behind bars. Multiple angles and story lines are explored, almost always from the incarcerated point of view. 'Middle of Nowhere', instead, puts the focus on an accomplished young woman whose life hangs still when her young husband is incarcerated for a long term, and makes the movie about the effects of incarceration on people who are on the outside, supposedly free, but actually suffering by proxy a set of restrictions and struggles that derive from the fact that a loved one or in-law is not present. That is an interesting take on the subject.Nonetheless, the script is just too slow. There are several cogent reasons for a script to be slow, such as character development, parallel narratives - but none of them could possible justify it here. Thus, it becomes very difficult to keep paying attention on what the director had in mind as dozens of minutes are just fillers that, in turn, are juxtaposed with some pivotal scenes that are paradoxically too hurried up.

blackprojectionist I'm always really happy to see films directed by African American women, period. It's so hard to get a budget, so hard to make it happen, and so few sistas writing and directing feature length narrative films, I make a point to support. When Ava DuVernay won the Best Director award 2012's Sundance Film Festival for her second feature film Middle of Nowhere, I was really overjoyed, and excited to see the film. Especially since the film covers a subject I'm very passionate about, incarceration of African American men. I was also excited to see that David Oyewolo was cast to play "Brian," as I consider him one of the greatest actors in Hollywood; the Sidney Poitier of his generation. And wow, the lead played by Emayatzy Corinealdi was a real treat to see her work, she's beautiful and has chops! Add one of the most talented up and coming Directors of Photography, Bradford Young to the equation and yooooooooo! So, I'm all the way in... and yeah... I find myself in the middle of nowhere. I want to feel more, the actors are good... and the film is kind of muted, seems to be mostly shot in natural light, lots of shadows, brooding. No commentary on prison industrial complex, this film is about relationships, in a vacuum. But I want to talk about brothers being incarcerated and an exponentially greater margin for the same crimes committed by white males, but... yeah... no, not this film. So, I got over that, and rode the film for what it is, a look at a difficult time in a woman's life, who had really invested a lot in her relationship with her incarcerated husband. You know what I dug though, we get to see folks who are living on the margins in L.A., like they don't cars and have to take the bus, folks are struggling... like in reality out there. And I really respect DuVernay for letting her characters be struggling financially, which is in itself actually revolutionary for most films that have to do with Black characters in Hollywood these days... it's like it's daring to not be corporate lawyers, athletes, marketing tycoons or whatever. Yeah, I want to see a story about a bus driver, an nurse and an incarcerated brother, here played by Omari Hardwick. So why do I feel, like I want to like this film more than I actually did when I left the theater. Is it because it didn't offer a Hollywood ending for me? Nooooo, that can't be it!!!! Definitely worth seeing, but wasn't really the film I had got so hyped to see.