You Can Count On Me (DVD)

I first came across esteemed playwright Kenneth Lonergan when I saw the much-touted production of his This Is Our Youth the year before last. Since then I’ve kept meaning to follow up and finally got one more step down the road in watching his celluloid directorial debut, You Can Count On Me. This simple tale of fraught familial relations stars the luminous Laura Linney in an Oscar nominated turn as Sammy Prescott, who has spent her whole life in Scottsville, New York, and has settled into a routine of being Lending Officer at the local bank, raising her son Rudy (Rory Culkin) as a single parent, and filing the correspondence she receives from her wayward ...  Read the complete review

Rarely does one find a film of such honesty. Most films are dramatised to such an extent that it is easy to separate them from reality. This is by no more a fault than a comment on the creative process. It is generally necessary to make things a little more dramatic as, quite frankly, average people doing average things is pretty dull. That You Can Count On Me shows this, and still manages to remain compelling throughout is an incredible feat. We are offered a window into the life of Sammy (Laura Linney), an average woman in small-town America. This isn't the kind of place where people fulfil their dreams, but she is comfortable here. She raises her eight year ...  Read the complete review

You Can Count on Me Revolving mainly around a single Character by the name of Sammy (played by Laura Linney), You can count on me is a film in Camouflage - you think it will be one type of movie - an all sweet Rom Com, then it changes to a grim tale of a struggle against the odds. When the film commences, everything is fine - Sammy is leading a happy enough life (albeit a touch repetitive and slightly uninspired), settled in her home, her job and above all her ways. She leads an independent life, quite happily managing her own lifestyle and the caring for her only child - an eight year old boy whome she loves dearly. She has, and does not need a ...  Read the complete review

Can the cinema swallow its pride and learn from humble television drama? Traffic showed that it can, with its ingestion of a multiple-storyline epic originally shown over several episodes on Channel 4. Now writer-director Kenneth Lonergan's You Can Count On Me - a handsome, well-acted and often very moving family drama with an Academy award-nominated performance from Laura Linney - seems effectively to have done the same thing with the daytime soap genre. The movie started life as a one-act stage play, so perhaps Lonergan would regard the soap comparison as an insult. Yet why should it be? Why should the film not invest soap with the same cultural ...  Read the complete review

With so many rave reviews to its credit, I was expecting just a little bit more from Director Ken Lonergan's You Can Count on Me. Even so, it's an impressive effort for a first-time director and a well made, engaging film that succeeds solely on the strengths of its narrative material and structure. Also to its credit are fine performances from Laura Linney and Mark Ruffalo. The entire setting for the story is a small town where Linney lives as a single mother, still inhabiting the house where she and her brother (Ruffalo) grew up. Early on, we understand her brother to be the rebellious wanderer type, having apparently spent most of his adult life in ...  Read the complete review