Critics reviews

The whole film reads like an exemplary literary classic, complete with the rich symbolism of fire and ice. The layers are so well established that instead of subtle complication the whole film is propelled by an internal logic that is crisp, cohesive and complete.

Sometimes the best form of revenge isn’t murder or maiming, but survival. This type of extreme endurance pumps through Debra Granik’s achingly cold Winter’s Bone, a tautly paced neo-noir set amid the dilapidated structures, abandoned cars, and barren woods of the Ozarks.

The stripped and collapsed world brought to the screen . . . stands in stark contrast to representations of similar territory in indie films from the Bush era. . . . In Winter’s Bone, people are poor and dangerous, which is to say they have dignity.

Director Debra Granik has an immaculate feeling for environment, monosyllabic hostility and the deforming effects of poverty, and everybody (except for pale, cherubic Lawrence, who wouldn’t last an hour in an authentic Ozarkian junkyard) looks credibly gnarled and hungry. . . . It’s a vivid, punishing, craggy-faced picture that, due to my allergy to ostentatious Ameriendie squalidness, I’m in no rush to revisit.

You could call it a Sopranos-style crime-family melodrama, a quasi-documentary portrait of poor, white rural culture in the Ozarks, a Southern gothic fable or a coming-of-age yarn with an irresistible and unstoppable teenage female protagonist. Really, it's all those things, and even where those genres or styles seem incompatible, Granik pulls them together into a forceful, breathless, compassionate thriller.

Something more primal, almost Greek in its archaic power, is at stake in “Winter’s Bone,” and its visual and emotional starkness do not feel like simple badges of authenticity.