- Critic Score
- Most active
- Publication
- Most clicked
-
100After "Monster," here is another extraordinary role from an actress [Theron] who has the beauty of a fashion model but has found resources within herself for these powerful roles about unglamorous women in the world of men.
-
90Happily, North Country is not all social-realist grit or straight sermonizing. Not only is Theron achingly real, the fine supporting performances here lend even more dramatic reach and human scale.
-
88A classic social drama in the proud tradition of "Norma Rae," "Silkwood" and "Erin Brockovich."
-
88What 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.
-
88It infuriated me. It broke my heart. It convinced me that Caro, who's from New Zealand, is a strong, clear-voiced filmmaker
-
80The story of America's first successful class-action sexual-harassment lawsuit may sound dull, but Caro ratchets up the intensity until every flung epithet and threat stings. The approach is sometimes shrill, but it's effective.
-
80Powerful and then some.
-
80An emotionally potent story told with great dignity.
-
80An engrossing, well-crafted story of a grave injustice avenged, hitting all the right notes of sympathy, outrage and, finally, relief.
-
80Charlize Theron, in nonglam mode, dominates this powerful drama about sexual harassment at a Minnesota iron ore mine in the early 90s.
-
78A welcome and appropriate treat is the flurry of Bob Dylan tunes that can be heard playing in the background of this northern Minnesota story.
-
75Despite its serious subject matter, North Country is a crowd-pleaser at heart.
-
75North Country may be a simplistic account of a hard-won battle, but it will have audiences cheering.
-
75Richard Jenkins gives the standout supporting performance, worthy of Oscar consideration, as Josey's father, a miner unable to conceal his anger at his daughter for having a child out of wedlock and, now, creating dissension at his workplace.
-
75The milieu here is unforgiving, which makes fighting for basic rights important. You get a sense of why Bob Dylan -- who performs on this soundtrack -- wanted to bolt this frigid part of the map.
-
75Stirring and emotionally forceful.
-
75There is something almost reverential about the way director Niki Caro shoots the winding roads leading into Minnesota's North Country mining community, just before dismantling all of it piece by piece.
-
75Might have been richer, tougher, more honestly liberal if it had revealed a few more shades of gray among the men.
-
75Overcooked and simplistic in spots.
-
70The issue of sexual politics so dominates the story that it's a relief when an emotional showdown involves family rather than workplace issues. Not so surprisingly, these are the movie's best scenes.
-
70The problem with Seitzman's script is how predictable almost all of it feels.
-
70The movie's old-school feminism is true to its subject, and Theron proves charismatic enough to stand alone as an emblematic working-class heroine doing what she has to do without benefit of feminist theory. I'm even willing to forgive this rousing drama its coy, flirty ending, if only because its heroine has the grace not to drive her pickup truck off a cliff.
-
70Frances McDormand, as the lone female union rep, and Richard Jenkins, as Josie's angry miner dad, cut through the predictability.
-
70You cannot help being stirred by the reach and depth, the constant rebuffs to sloppiness, of a strong ensemble.
-
70But the contrast between setting and story isn't all that bars North Country from fulfillment. The major trouble is Theron. She plays Josey as well as is needed, but she is simply too beautiful.
-
67Harrelson does his considerable best to redeem the hackneyed role of the dreamboat do-gooder. No matter how conventional his roles may be, he always gives them a feral quality, an eccentricity, that lifts them out of the ordinary.
-
67Caro stumbles in a couple ways. By flashing forward throughout the film to scenes of the climactic courtroom showdown, she blunts the story's dramatic impact.
-
67At best, North Country just inspires you to read the book.
-
A potentially great movie--with talent and plot points to spare--that settles for being just okay.
-
63For all North Country's blockbuster elements, the film remains a curiously uninvolving affair.
-
63North Country resorts to theatrics a judge would squelch after one outburst, as director Niki Caro and writer Michael Seitzman aim for a "Spartacus" feel.
-
60An above average film, and features fine performances (Theron and McDormand are probably stone locks for more Oscar nominations), but be wary of the advertising pointing out the film's similarities to movies like "Erin Brockovich."
-
60Having established Josey as the focus of the entire iron range's enmity, the filmmakers panic, and North Country spectacularly self-destructs in a climactic courtroom free-for-all.
-
60To see this overly schematic movie, is to be made to feel -- inaccurately as it turns out -- that the whole thing is a hopelessly exaggerated fabrication. The taint of the melodramatic techniques used in key segments infects the entire movie and makes us question the truth of a significant historical reality.
-
60That the film works as well as it does, delivering a tough first hour only to disintegrate like a wet newspaper, testifies to the skill of the filmmakers as well as to the constraints brought on them by an industry that insists on slapping a pretty bow on even the foulest truth.
-
50Any similarities between Josey and Lois Jenson, the real woman who made Eveleth Mines pay for their sins in a landmark 1988 class-action suit, are purely coincidental. Instead, we get a TV-movie fantasy of female empowerment glazed with soap-opera theatrics.
-
50What should have been an important addition to popular films about women's rights winds up being the most insulting courtroom drama since "Ally McBeal" was put out of its misery.
-
40It starts off well enough but slowly sinks under the leaden weight of its worthiness.
-
40A long, slow slog through what could have been, and should have been, a more absorbing story.
prev
next
Page:
- 1
User score distribution:
-
Positive: 23 out of 28
-
Mixed: 3 out of 28
-
Negative: 2 out of 28
-
TomM.8