Critics reviews

Working with DP Cody Stokes, a close collaborator on Soft in the Head, Silver achieves a rare kind of intimacy between the seven or eight characters in the home, through tenuous close-ups and unstable yet focused medium shots.

[T]his naturalistic snapshot set at a bucolic residence for pregnant girls feels like it needed more gestation before cameras rolled... Silver, who co-wrote the free-form script with Chloe Domont (a producer here) and editor-cinematographer Cody Stokes, keeps the pacing languid and the performances loose, to mixed effect.

Even though Silver's films tend to be conversational, in Uncertain Terms, he lets the silences build up... Other times, crucial information, such as Jean's growing jealousy over Robbie and her animosity toward Nina, are communicated through locked glances, and in half whispers. Only during the escalating fights between Nina and Chase, or after the sudden appearance of Robbie's wife, do the exchanges quickly reach emotional crescendos, and thus prove quite wrenching.

Silver is clearly interested in the social dynamics of communities and their different treatments of intruders, and conversely, how intruders can lead communities to turn on one another.

Uncertain Terms is a symphony of small behavioral ripples—its astuteness impressing itself upon one cumulatively and powerfully, until it's apparent that Silver has fashioned a bracing acknowledgement of growth's destabilizing pain, which is reliably inescapable regardless of age or gender.

It's remarkable how much of a communal atmosphere Silver is able to generate from what amounts to a handful of quick cutaways to the non-speaking characters. A more show-offy director with a much larger budget might approach this scene with a 360-degree shot that circles around the table to see each character in tandem. Instead Silver opts for fragments of looks, creating a less continuous and more disharmonious effect, each character keeping to their own thoughts.

Silver’s latest film “Uncertain Terms” finds some substance within its ideology of evaporated ambitions, though there’s plenty of empty space in which the film is still able to limit itself.

Pivoting off pop music cues, "Uncertain Terms" can feel slight, and, oddly for this filmmaker, it dips into clichéd dialogue. While the movie creates an intriguing emotional space in which characters at the end of their ropes can open up, there's the distinct sense of a missed opportunity.

The film is brisk, brief, well acted, smartly crafted, and shrewdly judged. Silver stages strong, fascinating scenes of the residents throwing meager birthday parties, or bristling at their schoolwork; these are countered by a pair of knockout confrontations between angry, territorial men, neither absolutely certain the fight they’re moving toward is worth it.

Silver's incisive direction blends patient discernment and expressive angularity; he develops his characters in deft and rapid strokes and builds tension with an almost imperceptible heightening of tone and darkening of mood. The involuted acting and the freestyle cinematography, intensely sensitive to the flickers of the moment, yield sensual and emotional wonders.

An ensemble drama that resonates with exquisite tension and emotional candor...

Assembled on a shoestring budget, “Uncertain Terms” looks better than many films made at significantly greater cost. Alternating between careful compositions and intimate, expressive closeups, Stokes takes full advantage of the scenic locales of rural New York and the unadorned performances Silver elicits from the cast.