PREMIERE.COM'S REVIEW (posted 4/15/05)

How do you make a movie about people who really don't do or say much of anything? Oh, and keep it interesting. Most of us, most of the time are not experiencing life-altering breakthroughs. Movies like Ordinary People like to play dress-up in the carefully art-directed settings of real American's lives. But Winter Solstice, a debut indie from writer-director Josh Sternfeld, makes such fare seem a bit contrived. It's certainly not the most compelling or immediately satisfying storytelling, but it's intriguingly real.

Jim Winters (Anthony LaPaglia) is a gardener living in the lush suburbs of New Jersey who lost his wife in a car accident years ago. The man clearly never really healed from the wound. Jim has two teenage sons, Gabe and Pete, played with beautifully natural understatement by Aaron Stanford and Mark Webber. Their mother's death is too much for both sons to comprehend—their own teenage unrooted restlessness is bewildering enough. These are the sort of people who just don't say all that much to begin with, because really, they're not sure what they think. And now Gabe has decided to leave home, Pete is in danger of failing out of high school and Dad is at the awkward beginning of a relationship with a down-to-earth sort of woman in the neighborhood (Allison Janney).

While Stanford and Webber seem remarkably like brothers, somehow LaPaglia seems miscast as their father. He comes off Italian-American (he just looks that way) and they don't. But everyone here honors the film's intentions of portraying simple reality and its ambiguity. There's pathos in that. You may not be all that entertained by this film, but its likeness to life could stick with you for a long time.

—Kevin Allison