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100The movie heroes who affect me most are not extroverted. They don't strut, speechify and lead armies. They have no superpowers. They are ordinary people who are faced with a need and rise to the occasion. Ree Dolly is such a hero.
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100This is one helluva drama, with one helluva star turn by Jennifer Lawrence as Ree.
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100Every 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.
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100It's those noir bones that give this social-realist drama its punch, as if Humphrey Bogart had been recast as a 17-year-old girl and dropped into the poorest corner of America.
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100This unblinking look at America's Red State Crystal Meth Belt is an instant Southern Gothic classic.
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100Like "The Hurt Locker," Winter's Bone is a spare but riveting drama with a female director. It is built around a raw, revelatory performance by a young, little-known lead actor.
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100Winter's Bone is the best film of the year.
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100A vivid reworking of Daniel Woodrell's novel that brings the book's conflicted heroine to searing life in a piece of unhurried filmmaking too rarely seen these days.
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100A genuine triumph, a great movie with astounding performances so natural, so genuine, that you forget it's a movie.
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100Again, Granik has foregrounded a bold woman, expertly balanced between fearlessness and Ree's own private nervousness.
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100Winter's Bone never hits a false note.
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100One of the unshowiest and most true-blooded epics of Americana you're ever likely to see.
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100With a level-gazed approach to its milieu, empathetic but clear-eyed, Winter's Bone practically makes up for 40 years of "Deliverance"-style hillbilly cartoons.
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100Lawrence is in every scene of Winter's Bone, leaving her plenty of opportunity to make false moves. I dare you to find one, in a performance to be remembered during awards season.
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100This movie's an absolute knockout. I know it's only June, but I'm damned if this isn't the breakthrough American film of the year.
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100For 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.
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100Spectacular for its humanity, austere beauty and heart-stopping urgency.
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100In its lived-in, completely non-ideological way, Winter's Bone is one of the great feminist works in film.
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100Granik has no taste for noir archness, opting for a chilly, shot-on-decaying-locations naturalism that feels as lived-in as Lawrence's performance.
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100Granik filmed in actual locations and enlisted many locals as actors. They blend unobtrusively with the professionals in the cast.
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90Winter's Bone so far past any notion of formula or precedent that comparison is a futile exercise. This film is a thing all its own.
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90Intense, 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.
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90The film's realism is a point of entry rather than the whole point of the exercise. Its setting is finally subordinate to the main character, as memorable and vivid a heroine as you are likely to see on screen this season.
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90Raw but utterly enveloping.
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88Winter's Bone is unforgettable. It means to shake you, and does.
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88It'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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85On its face, Winter's Bone, like "Down to the Bone," is a bleakly realist drama about a community decimated by poverty and hopelessness, yet bound together by deep ties of class, gender and blood.
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In the end, the most interesting aspect of this quiet, sometimes frustrating, sometimes thrilling film is the way it teases out the intricate power structures that flourish even in as godforsaken (and lovely) a place as the Ozarks.
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80Winter's Bone often seems to be unfolding in a world apart, with its own moral logic and codes of conduct. It might feel like prison if it weren't so obviously home.
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75The 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. It's for performances like this that moviegoers find themselves taking a chance on a title that doesn't have a fast-food tie-in.
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75It's not always an easy movie to watch, but its characters are unforgettable.
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75Winter'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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75This 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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70Grim backwoods tale takes its time building momentum.
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70Debra Granik's Winter's Bone is one of those movies -- like last year's inner-city down-a-thon, "Precious" -- that can't quite make a distinction between profundity and plain old bleakness.
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63A tough movie to love.
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60Amid all the hokey hill stuff, Lawrence's hard eyes and manner draw us in.
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50The 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.
User score distribution:
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Positive: 55 out of 71
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Mixed: 8 out of 71
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Negative: 8 out of 71
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MarilynN.10
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