In acclaimed 'Diane,' a film critic goes behind the camera

NEW YORK (AP) — As an esteemed film critic and director of the New York Film Festival, Kent Jones' perch is the film world is a rarified one. But he has long harbored a dream beyond his day job. He doesn't just want to write about and curate movies. He wants to make them.

"It's where I've always been aimed," Jones said with the certainty of a compass while sitting in a Park Slope cafe on a recent morning in Brooklyn.

Such aspirations, of course, do not always make sound life goals. Proximity to moviemaking can cloud even the most level-headed of thinkers. The New Yorker critic Pauline Kael infamously flamed out in Hollywood after Warren Beatty lured her to Los Angeles to work on James Toback's "Love & Money."

Jones has carved out a career, and a sensibility, far different than Kael's. But if anyone was skeptical when Jones, 58, went off to make his first fiction film, he understands.

"More than one person has been like, 'I was very nervous about watching your movie and then I was relieved that I liked it as much as I did,'" said Jones. "That's been a common thread. I think people were kind of like, 'He's going to make a movie?' But from the inside, it was always about moving in that direction. I just took" — and here Jones roars with laughter — "a different route."

The result is "Diane," a modest and raw character study starring Mary Kay Place as a selfless widower in wintery Pittsfield, Massachusetts, where she spends guilt-ridden days always on the move: visiting her addicted and overbearing son (Jake Lacy), a soup kitchen, her diminishing community of friends and family.

Shot on a meager budget over 20 days in upstate New York (Place calls it "a 59-cent movie"), "Diane," which is in limited release Friday, has been hailed for its clear-eyed intimacy, for the bracingly honest performance of its...