Shotgun Stories.

"Shotgun Stories is broadly in the category of what we sniggering urbanites used to call 'deadbeat regionalism' (before the indie movement was kicked into the mainstream by Quentin Tarantino and Harvey Weinstein)," writes New York's David Edelstein. "But the sensibility here is more subversive, more attuned to the South's subliminal violence. Adam Stone's wide-screen cinematography captures the heat and the corrosive moisture, the lush green of the cotton fields and the rust of the pickup trucks, the natural beauty juxtaposed with the unnatural human debris.... Shotgun Stories has a flawless cast, but it's the peculiarity of Michael Shannon that keeps it from becoming too obvious."

Updated through 3/27.

"The film seems to work so hard at undermining the inclination of average, urban audiences and film reviewers to label this as a film about rednecks, hillbillies, white trash, and holler folk that it never provides an adequate sense of the passions at the root of the characters' exceedingly poor judgment," writes Leo Goldsmith in indieWIRE. "But if this represents a shortcoming in his screenplay - supplanting character development with a collection of offhand quirks and mannerisms - Nichols more than compensates with his direction of a dedicated cast."

"The film might have worked better if it was simply a poetic representation of farmlands and parking lots, with a repressed American anger haunting every moment, rather than a long, slow build-up to a showdown," suggests Jeremiah Kipp in Slant.

For Filmmaker, Nick Dawson talks with director Jeff Nichols "about modern day revenge movies, the influence of Lawrence of Arabia, and his dad taking him to see Pale Rider in the second grade."

Update, 3/26: "Shotgun Stories is as cool-headed as its characters are reckless," writes Matt Zoller Seitz in the New York Times. "The film is a here-and-now American potboiler and a stripped-down parable that can be appreciated by any culture."

"Glorious Southern fried sloth, in epic widescreen," writes Steven Boone at the House Next Door. "Writer-director Jeff Nichols plays everything at half speed, passing the time in a style similar to films directed by his producer, David Gordon Green."

This is a "very solid first film, which should, among other things, be a breakthrough feature for the superb Shannon, a stalwart character actor (World Trade Center, Before the Devil Knows You're Dead) who here - more than in the alienating film version of Bug - proves that he can carry a picture," writes Premiere's Glenn Kenny. "Which shouldn't detract from the fact that the rest of the cast is note-perfect as well."

"Despite the mythic ring, the drama of Shotgun Stories is resolutely ordinary; Nichols arranges scenes in even blocks, punctuated by shots of fields or telephone poles dominoed into the distance," writes Nicolas Rapold in the L Magazine. "This dead-air evenness is the movie's strength, utterly relentless, as well as its weakness."

"A lyrical story of feuding familial factions in Southern Arkansas, Shotgun gets off to a slow, quirk-leavened start, but as a seemingly minor character morphs from grating comic relief to major catalyst for action, the film gains weight and eventually snowballs into an undeniably affecting moral tragedy," writes Karina Longworth at the SpoutBlog.

Updates, 3/27: "If there's one below-the-radar American movie of the past year that has caused film buffs, on their way out of festival screenings, to call their friends and demand, 'Why the hell haven't we heard more about this one?' - that movie is Shotgun Stories," writes Salon's Andrew O'Hehir. "I honestly believe that in another era Shotgun Stories might have become a huge hit."

"Shotgun Stories deserves credit for its credible and non-stereotypical narrative of rural vendetta," writes Chris Barsanti in Film Journal International. "But there's no escaping the fact that the film, well-crafted though it may be, is ultimately just as slow as the proverbial molasses."

Posted by dwhudson at March 24, 2008 1:16 PM