Reviewed by David Levinson

OPENING with a pretty ordinary-looking house suspended in darkness, Maria Full of Grace hardly skips a beat before the titular lady is thrown headfirst – within a matter of minutes – from a muted familial goodbye into the throngs of factorywork. Taken from a literal grab-bag, it's an open-air endorsement of Marson's considerable control over material that could've easily ended up in the junkyard for films about socioeconomic underachievers: he tends to keep things both narratively and emotionally concise, trafficking in several time leaps to get to the destination, and deflecting almost all of its turmoil onto the hard, matter-of-fact greys that accompany the bus ride. And, perhaps most importantly, he ditches context.