Late summer, like midwinter, is a time of year when it’s best to shun the big studio releases. Any star-studded blockbuster or crowd-pleasing comedy that’s actually worth its budget (i.e., not Cowboys & Aliens or The Change-Up) would have elbowed its way into theaters between Memorial Day and July 4th; any drama with more than a hint of Oscar potential (i.e., not The Help) would have been saved for November or December. Moviegoers are better off seeking out the smaller releases instead, looking for the curious pieces of artistic driftwood that sometimes wash up in a season’s dying days.
Perhaps this year’s strangest such offering is Another Earth, a movie notable for its leading lady (about whom more anon) and its peculiar genre-bending premise. Late on a New England night, the teenaged and MIT-bound Rhoda Williams (Brit Marling) hears a radio report about a newly discovered Earth-like planet, drunkenly leans out her car window to stare up into the night sky, and plows into a college professor and his family, killing his wife and son and unborn daughter. The professor (William Mapother) is thrown into a coma, while Rhoda spends four years in prison. Then the movie leaps ahead to after they’ve both been released — him into grief, her into guilt — and tracks her attempts to forge some kind of connection with the man whose life she recklessly destroyed.
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