“There isn’t much talk and not a drop of cynicism in “Ballast,” Lance Hammer’s austerely elegant, emotionally unadorned riff on life and death in the Mississippi Delta. Shot with a sure hand and a cast of unknowns, the film doesn’t so much tell a story as develop a tone and root around a place that, despite the intimate camerawork, remains shrouded in ambiguity.… It’s a serious achievement and a welcome sign of a newly invigorated American independent cinema.”
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Read Full Review at THE NEW YORK TIMES

“4/4 Stars. "Ballast" inexorably grows and deepens and gathers power and absorbs us. I always say I hardly ever cry at sad films, but I sometimes do, just a little, at films about good people.”
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Read Full Review at CHICAGO SUN-TIMES

“4/4 Stars. I love "Ballast"... one of the few American pictures of 2008 to say what it wants to say, visually and narratively... Everything has its place in this small, sure wonder.”
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Read Full Review at CHICAGO TRIBUNE

“4/4 Stars. Magnificent... This is the most significant feature about poor black life since Charles Burnett's 1977 "Killer of Sheep."”
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Read Full Review at THE BOSTON GLOBE

“"Ballast" has the heft and substance its name implies. A double prize winner at Sundance, this austere, rigorous film has a sense of place, a feeling for reality so compelling it makes us feel like we're living it, not just watching on a screen. ”
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Read Full Review at LOS ANGELES TIMES

“Remarkable, unfailingly intelligent... Unhurried rhythms and spare, beautifully composed shots infuse "Ballast" with the sweet, dark melancholy of a Delta blues.”
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Read Full Review at THE VILLAGE VOICE

“Ballast is a highly sophisticated film (Hammer cites the works of the Dardenne brothers and Robert Bresson as models), but moment by moment it is such an organic expression of the Delta and the people who live there that it feels made up on the spot.”
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Read Full Review at ART FORUM

“An extraordinary debut... A film that operates by its principles and engages audiences' best human responses.”
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Read Full Review at VARIETY

“An impressive and courageous filmmaking debut that screams Sundance for all the right reasons.”
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Read Full Review at THE HOLLYWOOD REPORTER

“BALLAST reminds us that you can find poetry in the unlikeliest and the saddest of places... Lance Hammer has set the bar high.”
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Read Full Review at SCREEN INTERNATIONAL

“Poetic and profound... The one indisputably great film at Sundance '08.”
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Read Full Review at ROLLING STONE

“It takes daring, as well as skill, to make a drama that allows the audience to get its bearings only gradually, and Ballast, written and directed by Lance Hammer, has the audacity and talent to render that process an arresting one. The film doesn't just bring three troubled, wayward characters in the Mississippi Delta to rich, gnarled, vivid life. It presents them as enigmas who come into focus moment by moment, scene by scene, and that journey of discovery forces us to cast away the clichés of race, poverty, and existence in the Deep South.”
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Read Full Review at ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY

“(FEATURE STORY) Delta Blues in Black and White: How Lance Hammer earned his beautiful new film Ballast”
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Read Full Review at LA WEEKLY

“(FEATURE STORY) Eschewing a script in work, life”
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Read Full Review at THE BOSTON GLOBE

“(FEATURE STORY) Leaving Hollywood, Heading South, Bound for Indie”
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Read Full Review at THE NEW YORK TIMES

“A wholly original meditation on lost souls trying to gain a foothold in a bleak and treacherous landscape. It is, I think, the single most impressive feature to premiere at Sundance since "Half Nelson" in 2006, and the high-water mark by which all others in and out of this year's competition should be judged.”
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Read Full Review at THE VILLAGE VOICE (01/21/08)

“"Ballast", like every outstanding film, is something of a double experience. The drama holds us yet we are equally taken by Hammer’s vision and his ability to fulfill it.”
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Read Full Review at THE NEW REPUBLIC

“Bracing... Remarkably sure-footed... A crystal clear humanist vision of broken-down people who find a semblance of stability in each other.”
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Read Full Review at INDIEWIRE

“A stunning piece of work...”
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Read Full Review at TIME OUT NY

“It’s this promise—of living without emotional paralysis despite financial struggle and loss—that makes Ballast such a wondrous, moving experience, and which Hammer details in a final shot so subtle and revelatory and yet so specifically attuned to these people’s daily experiences that it nearly doesn’t feel like a revelation at all.”
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Read Full Review at REVERSE SHOT

“A perfect film...”
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Read Full Review at THE SEATTLE TIMES

“Touching and human, a small story of necessity and responsibility rousing defeated people that slowly unfolds and fills the film with the authenticity of its lives...Filled with the kinds of textures, and the kinds of lives, you don't get with the polish of Hollywood.”
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Read Full Review at SEATLLE POST-INTELLIGENCER

“The lack of a soundtrack (hiphop, blues, jazz) reveals the source of black music—the black voice itself. Often it’s hard to understand what is being said but the music of black English is heard and felt. Ballast is a powerful film.”
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Read Full Review at THE STRANGER

“Sensational...”
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Read Full Review at THE NEW YORK SUN

“(FEATURE STORY) A Director Creates Ballast in His Soul”
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Read Full Review at THE NEW YORK SUN

“The story moves at the ambling pace of uncertain lives, a pace representing the filmmaker's trust that his audience will stay involved as several important events unfold. His trust is justified by his talent. This ostensibly simple film evokes whole lives in 96 minutes...”
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Read Full Review at THE WALL STREET JOURNAL

““Ballast,” is told in the most urgent and emphatic fashion, breathless yet hushed and gentle with a level of filmmaking skill that makes the head spin from its first few cuts.”
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Read Full Review at NEWCITY CHICAGO

“Ballast is a quiet, delicately beautiful work, an assured debut that handily skirts the pitfalls of neo-neorealism. The movie's characters aren't specimens, or representatives, but distinct and complicated individuals whose shortcomings are outweighed by their generosity of spirit. They give back to each other, and Ballast gives back to us.”
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Read Full Review at PHILADELPHIA CITY PAPER

“Blockbusters full of juicy bosoms and car explosions don't speed by as quickly or hold the eye as completely as this empathic, wise, and deeply profound movie does.”
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Read Full Review at BALTIMORE CITY PAPER

“Has the sparse purity of barren trees and the brutal intimacy of a broken vow.”
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Read Full Review at MILWAUKEE JOURNAL SENTINEL

“What they produced is something that is true not just to this place or to these people's lives, or to the lives of poor people or black people, but to the experience of being human.”
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Read Full Review at FILM THREAT

“Nothing quite prepared me for the soulful power of "Ballast"...”
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Read Full Review at AIN'T IT COOL NEWS

“Like every shot in Lance Hammer’s feature directorial debut, it’s dead simple but beautifully composed, and it gets you by playing hard to get.”
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Read Full Review at SPOUT

“Elegiac, rapturously lovely...”
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Read Full Review at THE NEW YORK TIMES (09/07/08)

“The film evokes the best of Terrence Malick from the first shot (of a young boy charging into a flock of geese), and the resemblance holds throughout— the effect is not so much homage as the sense that Hammer is Malick’s heir. Every word of dialogue feels freighted with nuance here, every footfall and distant barking dog loaded with uncanny power.”
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Read Full Review at HONOLULU WEEKLY