North Country Reviews
Top Critic
You cannot help being stirred by the reach and depth, the constant rebuffs to sloppiness, of a strong ensemble.
Though the dirt and grime in North Country are artfully applied, it's purely cosmetic and skin-deep.
| Original Score: 2/4
North Country does a good job in ratcheting up the tension and unfairness until the audience is brought to the breaking point.
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| Original Score: 3/4
If there was ever any thought that perhaps Whale Rider was a fluke, North Country should erase all doubt.
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| Original Score: 3.5/4
North Country delivers an emotional wallop and a couple of performances worthy of recognition come award time.
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| Original Score: 3/4
She's [Caro] got a good story to tell (based, loosely, on a real-life case), and a marvelous cast to help her tell it.
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| Original Score: 3/4
What gives North Country urgency is that it's about how a man comes to understand that it's bad for him and for his community to deny his daughter privileges and prerogatives he'd grant his son.
| Original Score: 3.5/4
Niki Caro, director of Whale Rider, has made a classic underdog-vs.-the-system story, rendered in the harsh blue-grays of a Minnesota winter.
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| Original Score: 4/5
Theron's truly raw and impassioned performance as Josey - - can't save the film from its own gradually slowing pace and seriously compromised third act.
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| Original Score: 2.5/4
In the end, the no-nonsense direction by Caro (the New Zealander who directed Whale Rider), the terrific actors and the pitiless visuals by the great Menges more than carry the day.
| Original Score: 3.5/4
It's a memorable and touching portrayal of a certain kind of woman who is vital and determined instead of neurotic and victimized.
North Country may be a simplistic account of a hard-won battle, but it will have audiences cheering.
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| Original Score: 3/4
Despite its serious subject matter, North Country is a crowd-pleaser at heart.
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| Original Score: 3/4
There's nothing cool or dispassionate anywhere in this film. It radiates waves of heat.
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| Original Score: 3/4
For all North Country's blockbuster elements, the film remains a curiously uninvolving affair.
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| Original Score: 2.5/4
In overdoing the theatrics and hammering the clichés North Country does artistic injustice to its own important argument.
| Original Score: C-
North Country is in the tradition of workers-rights films like Norma Rae and Silkwood in that it sends its message through a convincing character whose temerity and courage are accompanied by less heroic baggage.
| Original Score: 3/4
If you can take North Country as a movie, not a news report, you'll find a moving work that explores sexual harassment with unusual candor.
| Original Score: B
North Country is a relentlessly discomforting movie. Nowhere does it let you settle into the lush cushions of a typical Hollywood entertainment
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| Original Score: 4/4
North Country is one of those movies that stir you up and make you mad, because it dramatizes practices you've heard about but never really visualized.
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| Original Score: 4/4
If you want to see good performances and cinematography wasted in a mediocre movie, that would be North Country.
It infuriated me. It broke my heart. It convinced me that Caro, who's from New Zealand, is a strong, clear-voiced filmmaker, who can bend courtroom cliches to her will.
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| Original Score: 3.5/4
Theron has once again deglamorized herself for a meaty dramatic role, and she gives a persuasive performance that surely will not be overlooked during the coming award season.
| Original Score: 3/4
At its best, North Country conveys what it's like to be a small-town social pariah and to fear for yourself in the workplace.
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| Original Score: 3/4
Studio filmmaking can make an event as fantastical as an alien invasion look like reality, and it can make something that actually took place feel as fake as crocodile tears. Which is what happens with North Country.
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| Original Score: 2/5
North Country is powerful and then some.
North Country is a "message movie" with a target so big that it's impossible to miss, which is part of the trouble.
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| Original Score: 3/5
A wobbly fiction about a real pioneering sex-discrimination case, North Country is an unabashed vehicle for its modestly de-glammed star, Charlize Theron.
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| Original Score: 2.5/5
Overall North Country is too self-consciously scaled as an anthem for the human spirit. We can spot where this movie is headed right from the beginning.
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| Original Score: B-
People in the film biz have been calling this one Erin Brockovich Goes to Fargo all along, but that isn't quite fair. It's Norma Rae Goes to Fargo.
Even when the film borders on melodrama in its final courtroom confrontations, Ms. Caro navigates the camera with skill.
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| Original Score: B+
While the film showcases moments of enormous power, there is something missing; perhaps it's subtlety, or perhaps it's the emotional connection the movie so desperately wants to make, but in the end, can't quite achieve.
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| Original Score: 2.5/4
This is nuance-free moviemaking, a drama about mine-workers with barely a glimpse of what the work entails.
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| Original Score: 1.5/4
Caro knows how to push viewers' buttons, and she does so every chance she gets. The weather in the movie might be chilly, but she makes sure our blood is boiling.
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| Original Score: 3/4
North Country is the most riled-up movie of the year.
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| Original Score: A-
Given the battle's enormous toll on the women's physical and psychological health, it's a perplexing irony that the movie 'inspired by' the case suffers such a bizarre failure of nerve.
North Country does what it sets out to do: inspire and uplift.
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| Original Score: 3/4
Occasionally inspired but much more often didactic.
An emotionally potent story told with great dignity.
