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by Walter Chaw Amateurish and lit like a hospital ward, the extraordinarily unpromising feature debut of Jason Ruscio is bolstered a bit by a game cast (especially a luminous Petra Wright, who deserves better) but undermined by a determined lack of craft, a clumsy, over-burdened screenplay, and a surplus of mordant self-righteousness. A tale of a woman (Wright) who makes the mortal error of returning to her abusive husband (Michael T. Ringer), Sam & Joe is shot on jittery, ugly, handheld DV exacerbated by what appears to be an over-affection for Tarantino's whip-pans, time-skip edits, and circular dialogue. Not a bad topic for a film (and indeed, the inescapable cycle of love and violence permeates a good portion of modern cinema to some degree or another); what grates about this picture is a feeling of arrogance–the student-film arthouse malady that infects guys with cameras, making them believe that great cinema springs full-grown from attractive actors and a hot-button topic. But nothing interesting comes from the piece: it's boring and flat, and the pathos that you might feel springs more from the understanding that embedded in Sam & Joe are the pieces of a good film–at least, an effective film–given short-shrift by a production that doesn't understand how to function within its medium (The Celebration and The Blair Witch Project are no more visually polished but are infinitely "smarter" about film), and doesn't appear overly interested in making the effort.
