‘Palm Trees and Power Lines’ Review: The Gripping Drama of a Teenager Drawn Into an Affair of Darkness

‘Palm Trees and Power Lines’ Review: Breakout Lily McInerny Boosts Painfully Honest Coming-of-Age Tale

Lea knows the difference between wrong and right. Wrong: the way dudes treat her mom. Wrong: her friends running out on their bill at a local diner. Wrong: getting into a strange man’s truck. But, as has forever been the human condition — and in the case of Jamie Dack’s uncomfortably honest “Palm Trees and Power Lines,” the teenage human condition — knowing is only half the battle, and Lea (a breakout Lily McInerny in a remarkable first feature …

‘Palm Trees and Power Lines’ Review: The Gripping Drama of a Teenager Drawn Into an Affair of Darkness

A good filmmaker doesn’t just stage a scene. He or she creates a space (temporal, emotional, psychological, suspenseful). When that happens, we’re no longer just watching the characters — we’re drawn right into that space, until we’re almost floating in it, in sync with the characters’ identities and interactions, their minds and heartbeats. That’s the […]

Sundance Review: Jamie Dack’s ‘Palm Trees And Power Lines’

Writer-director Jamie Dack has expanded her widely admired 2018 short film Palm Trees and Power Lines into a considerably more thorny and disturbing feature of the same title. Shot verité style on the most banal possible locations, the film, which is making its world premiere in the U.S. Dramatic Competition section of the Sundance Film Festival, takes an unvarnished look at an environment that is arid both literally and figuratively, one in whi…

Palm Trees and Power Lines review – an unnerving, remarkable debut

The first feature from Jamie Dack, about a relationship between a 34-year-old man and a 17-year-old girl, boasts a breakout performance for newcomer Lily McInernyPalm Trees and Power Lines, a remarkably sharp-eyed and bruising debut from writer-director Jamie Dack, opens in the distended, languid stretch of a teenage summer. Lea, played in a stunning first turn by newcomer Lily McInerny, is 17 years old and bored. She lives with her single mothe…