Middle of Nowhere

2012 | 101 minutes | Rated R

A tough nurse (Emayatzy Corinealdi) with a husband in prison struggles to keep her head on straight amid work demands, her husband's parole hearings, and the romantic advances of a charming bus driver (David Oyelowo). In its strongest moments this independent drama by Ava DuVernay suggests an update of hard-edged women's pictures like The Man I Love (1947) or I Can Get It for You Wholesale (1950), presenting noirish subject matter from a female perspective and advancing a sympathetic but unsentimental view of working-class city life. Unfortunately those moments are few and far between: the love triangle, which comes to overwhelm the second half, feels more like soap opera than anything else, and the able cast can't redeem DuVernay's often dreadful dialogue ("We're somewhere between the forgotten and the foreseen"). By Ben Sachs

Director: Ava DuVernay
Producer: Ava DuVernay and Howard Barish
Cast: Emayatzy Corinealdi, David Oyelowo, Omari Hardwick, Lorraine Toussaint, Edwina Findley, Sharon Lawrence, Dondre Whitfield, Troy Curvey III and Maya Gilbert