Film Review – The Glass Castle

Four years ago, Destin Daniel Cretton directed “Short Term 12,” which detailed the inner lives of those involved in a residential treatment facility. It was a beautiful, emotional feature. My favorite of the year. Cretton returns to screens with “The Glass Castle,” graduating to a larger, more mainstream project that has the opportunity to be seen by a wide audience, potentially flocking to theaters to view what the helmer has done with his adaptation of Jeannette Walls’s best-selling 2005 memoir. To maintain such broad expectations, Cretton smoothes his filmmaking fingerprints, reducing most of “The Glass Castle” to questionable sentimentality and troubling character arcs. It’s certainly a different beast than “Short Term 12,” but Cretton’s latest is in dire need of the same grit and intimacy, playing broad with primal emotions and delicate dramatics.  Read the rest at Blu-ray.com