A big winner at last year's Sundance Film Festival, Tim McCann's Desolation Angels is the relentlessly depressing story of an inarticulate, working-class lout who discovers that his girlfriend has been raped by one of his friends. Unwilling to go to the police, he sets about trying to avenge the crime himself, simultaneously upsetting his relationship, his job and his fragile mental health, and setting the scene for a somewhat disappointing ending that borders on anticlimactic. An edgy, disturbing, minimalist drama that calls to mind the early films of John Cassavetes, Desolation Angels is an all-too-realistic portrayal of miserable people leading miserable lives on society's fringes. It's powerful and intense—and McCann has a talent for capturing realistic dialogue and creating multi-dimensional characters—but after a while it begins to grate; many viewers will begin to feel like they've been locked in a closet with a group of intensely unpleasant people. Those looking for anything resembling escapist entertainment should probably avoid Desolation Angels, but for viewers with a high tolerance for challenging and oppressively bleak fare, it's a powerfully visceral film worth seeing.