Critics reviews

The dialogue is so consistently robust that you may not realize for a while that Life & Nothing More contains no music. Even the passages of silence, which register as punctuation in the drama, contribute to the musicality of the speech.

Méndez Esparza has burrowed so deep inside the embattled lives of his subjects, a struggling black family in Northern Florida, that he earns the title through the sheer clarity and consideration of his approach, which places a neorealist lens on a story that owes as much to Charles Burnett as it does to Mike Leigh and John Cassavetes.

A slow accumulation of closely observed moments that add up to something much more nuanced, a portrait of lives that can’t be reduced to statistics.

Because there is nothing flashy, cool, or kinetically exciting about Antonio Méndez Esparza’s second feature, you might not realize while watching Life and Nothing More that it is a near-perfect film, one that easily bears comparison with early works by the Dardenne Brothers, Ruby in Paradise by American indie pioneer Victor Nunez (who, here, is an executive producer), and Charles Burnett’s Killer of Sheep.

This seemingly effortless docu-realist production, which Méndez Esparza developed alongside his nonprofessional actors and revolves around a single mother and her teenage son simply trying to navigate a life that's rigged against fairness, is by and large patient in its discernment. The film bravely hums with resentment for how black lives in this country are set on a trajectory — toward poverty, imprisonment, and worse — that can feel irrevocable in its machinery.

Still awaiting distribution despite being the timeliest, best-acted, and most moving of all the English-language movies I saw in Toronto. . . . Unlike Martin McDonagh's Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri, which repeatedly bungles its big, block-letter ideas about justice, policing, and region-specific American life, Méndez Esparza opts for a quieter, more observant naturalism in relation to the same themes, stoking the anger at its core without smugness or hyperbole.

So compellingly directed and acted that for much of the time we could almost be watching a documentary, Life and Nothing More is an involving, quietly moving piece that eschews conventional narrative shape to offer a multi-layered depiction of exactly what the title promises. With its cliché-free picture of ostensibly undramatic African-American lives, Life and Nothing More belongs somewhat in the non-conformist lineage of Charles Burnett's Killer of Sheep.