Across the three features he's made to date, Tyler Taormina has emerged as a true American independent, with an inquisitive eye and extraordinary depth of feeling for adolescent rites of passage that unfold — poignantly, mysteriously, with a sense of romantic possibility — amid the suburbs' lonely, nocturnal stretches.

"Christmas Eve in Miller's Point" unfolds in and around a family gathering at a nice, average house in Long Island owned by the Balsanos. Through snippets of conversation, we learn that the matriarch of the family can't take care of herself anymore,