‘A Clear Shot’ is a Clear Miss

Theaters are closed, movies delayed, and access to press screenings are limited to streaming. There’s no better time to highlight smaller films — amazing movies without the big-studio marketing budget that makes it harder for you to find. Discover a new film festival darling and support new, emerging, and independent filmmakers. Sheltering in place doesn’t need to stop you from your weekend evening escape to the movies. Follow the flurry of upcoming reviews on Twitter, or find all my reviews for movies you can stream from right at home. At first blush, A Clear Shot, written and directed by Nick Leisure, is a straightforward hostage thriller. A group of men with guns will storm the lobby, fire into the air, yell for everyone to get down. What follows are terse and quick-witted conversations between robbers and the hostage negotiator in a psychological battle to get what both sides want. The hostage negotiator will repeatedly say that he doesn’t want anyone to get hurt, to which the robbers reiterate their demands. Hostages themselves negotiate whether to “do something” by way of intervening or wait for their hopeful rescue. A power struggle wages in the parking lot between the negotiator, S.W.A.T., and the “brass,” edging the negotiator closer to going rogue. You have seen that story before, if not many times, on major network television crime dramas and movies. Where you might hope A Clear Shot is a bait-and-switch, a Trojan horse that appears to be a generic heist that com…