Constellation

Deeply odd films are often deeply personal ones, and Constellation, a dazed, inchoate drama about a mixed-race Alabama family, tells a story that’s clearly close to the heart of writer-director Jordan Walker-Pearlman (The Visit). So close, in fact, it lacks perspective: Neither the camera nor the script can focus. After a Gothic ’60s prologue (forbidden love, gang rape), the movie somnambulates into generic sentimentality. Billy Dee Williams, as the family’s long-absent patriarch, reacts to this tonal retreat by looking sleepy. C