Hamilton

Charm City native Matthew Porterfield’s paean to his working-class, mixed-race Baltimore neighborhood has an odd length and is thus hell to distribute, so see it while you can. The dreamy, near-silent milieu, slight narrative (about estranged, unwed teen parents attempting to meet up before a monthlong separation) and oblique biblical allusions—Faulkner’s in here too—are sufficiently Malickian to generate comparisons to David Gordon Green, but Porterfield’s no rank pretender. Visual poetry aside, what makes Hamilton a treasure is its thoughtful, unsentimental fleshing out of lives often glimpsed (in movies and elsewhere) but rarely considered. (Opens Fri; Anthology.) — Mark Holcomb