Winter's Bone Reviews
Top CriticDebra Granik's bleak little film is as tough, unflinching and fascinating as the characters who eke out a life amid its cold, gray hills.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/4
Granik balances the pace and intrigue of a mystery thriller with total compassion for Ree, played with much skill by Lawrence.
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| Original Score: 4/5
This unblinking look at America's Red State Crystal Meth Belt is an instant Southern Gothic classic.
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| Original Score: 4/4
Winter's Bone is a genuine triumph, a great movie with astounding performances so natural, so genuine, that you forget it's a movie.
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| Original Score: 5/5
What we've been waiting for: a work of art that grabs hold and won't let go.
With Winter's Bone, Granik has morphed from a director worth watching to one who demands our undivided attention. She's got mine.
Full Review
| Original Score: 4/4
The result is a film and a character of unusual strength. Pity Ree, question her decisions, wonder about her future. But the girl does not quit.
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| Original Score: A
Jennifer Lawrence gives a stirring turn in a gift-of-a-lifetime role.
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| Original Score: 3.5/4
Both a whodunit and a coming-of-age tale, dominated by Jennifer Lawrence's luminous performance as the resourceful, much-tested Ree.
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| Original Score: 3/4
In an impeccable act of sympathetic imagination, director Debra Granik has entered into the soul of debt-ridden Appalachia.
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| Original Score: 4/4
This is a world out of time and, despite the trappings of flinty realism, the film too unfolds like an elemental myth from the stormy past -- a Greek tragedy driven by dark fates and struggling toward a catharsis.
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| Original Score: 3/4
For Jennifer Lawrence, she's probably the most gifted actress of her generation. How wonderful that, so young, she has already found a role worthy of her talent.
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| Original Score: A
The dialogue is so sparse and the plot is so lean in Winter's Bone, it requires acting of exemplary strength, and the movie delivers in spades, chiefly in the performances by Lawrence and Hawkes.
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| Original Score: 3/4
The gritty, desperate Ozarks milieu of Winter's Bone feels so real, so right, that you only slowly realize you're watching a detective movie.
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| Original Score: 4/4
It's been a long time since a film has conveyed a culture, and a sense of place, with such telling precision. At the same time, Winter's Bone thrums with suspense.
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| Original Score: 3.5/4
The social detail of a 21st-century mountain community is completely persuasive, heightening the drama immeasurably.
The way Lawrence captures a young woman's fear and resolve, often non-verbally, well ... this is a considerable talent well on her way to a great career.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/4
There is a hazard of caricature here. Granik avoids it. Her film doesn't live above these people, but among them.
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| Original Score: 4/4
This lead performance [from Jennifer Lawrence] is excellent.
A coming-of-age story that is not entirely about breaking free.
| Original Score: 4.5/5
The main reason for Winter's Bone to exist is that it delivers a little voyeuristic thrill -- a bit of poverty porno -- for the critics who awarded it their highest honors at this year's Sundance Film Festival.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2/4
Granik makes something real out of all of it. And even, against all odds, hopeful. Because, yes, this is a hard and stony land. But the life that manages to take root there tends to survive.
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| Original Score: 3.5/4
Winter's Bone is a welcome reminder that thrillers don't have to be loud and boisterous to grab the attention and keep it captive.
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| Original Score: 3/4
Spectacular for its humanity, austere beauty and heart-stopping urgency.
Following its brave heroine (an outstanding Jennifer Lawrence) as she seeks to uncover the truth behind her father's disappearance, the film employs the structure of a whodunit to take a tough, unflinching look at an impoverished Ozarks community.
Intense, immersive and in control, Winter's Bone has an art house soul inside a B picture body, and that proves to be a potent combination indeed.
Full Review
| Original Score: 4/5
Grim backwoods tale takes its time building momentum.
Every so often a film gets under our skin with its haunting authenticity, reinforcing our faith in the wonderfully transporting power of cinematic storytelling. Winter's Bone is unquestionably that film.
Lawrence is the movie's blooming discovery, a mesmerizing actor with a gaze that's the opposite of actress-coy and a voice modulated in the low, almost monotone cadences of local ways.
Full Review
| Original Score: A
Winter's Bone is raw, real, understated, fiercely intense and surprisingly gentle and decent amid bursts of ferocity in the rural crime culture where the story's set.
Winter's Bone sometimes feels like a haunted house, where only extreme deference to scary people will save you.
Full Review
| Original Score: 5/5
Lawrence gives a guarded and watchful performance.
For all the horror, it's the drive toward life, not the decay, that lingers in the mind. As a modern heroine, Ree Dolly has no peer, and Winter's Bone is the year's most stirring film.
Every once in a rare while a movie gets inside your head and heart, rubbing your emotions raw. The remarkable Winter's Bone is just such a movie.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/4
