![]() Set in a fading Texas hamlet just before the Korean War, the film follows a group of high schoolers - including real-life siblings Timothy and Sam Bottoms - as they teeter between adolescence and adulthood, each getting a taste of sex, love, and disappointment as the war looms over them all. Peter Bogdanovich’s 1971 film about a dying southwestern town is a beautiful, devastating masterpiece - a film ostensibly about slow rural decay and the boredom of small-town life that seethes with tension and repressed emotion. Where to watch: Amazon Prime, YouTube The Last Picture Show (1971) Through Ross’s delicate, soft lens, it’s kept at bay, at least for a while - much like the oncoming thunderstorm that serves as the film’s evening backdrop. (Consider: Mississippi Burning, Beloved, The Color Purple, and a film chosen for this list, Mudbound.) The weight of racial injustice does loom large over Hale County, but its primary work is to poeticize its subjects rather than frame them as victims. It’s incredibly rare to find any film about Black communities in rural America that’s not using racism as the central conflict. The result: a film that transforms the mundanity of normal American life into a beautiful, Tarkovsky-esque epic. Through assembled footage of a rural Alabama county and stunning cinematography, Ross provides a close read of everyday Black life powerful enough to rival anything since Charles Burnett’s Killer of Sheep. RaMell Ross’s tremendous, Oscar-nominated film Hale County might best be thought of as a tone poem rather than a traditional documentary. Where to watch: Amazon Prime, Hulu, YouTube Hale County This Morning, This Evening (2018) As a statement on rural American life, it’s unique, unforgettable, and deeply empathetic. Granik’s camera frames it unrelentingly and without judgment, allowing us to confront Ree’s everyday reality, and inevitably to see the humanity of everyone who endures it. Filmed in the poverty-ridden Ozark community where it’s set, the landscape we see in Winter’s Bone is squalid but refreshingly authentic. ![]() Co-star John Hawkes also got an Oscar nomination for playing her decrepit but well-meaning uncle, the only adult who has Ree’s back, to whatever degree he can. The general public mainly knows Lawrence through her goofy celeb persona and later career choices, but in Winter’s Bone, she turns in a performance that’s just about perfect. And she has to manage it almost entirely alone. To do that, she must navigate a world of drug lords and secrets and somehow uncover the truth without winding up dead herself. Winter’s Bone tells the story of a determined 17-year-old named Ree who embarks on the darkest hero’s quest: She has to find her missing father in order to keep her family’s house and keep her family together. It’s a bleak, beautiful, terrifying film that drew a Best Picture Oscar nod and launched its star Jennifer Lawrence’s entire career. Winter’s Bone (2008)īefore Ozark put the idea of “Ozark noir” into our heads, Debra Granik’s 2008 film Winter’s Bone did it first. (And no, Deliverance is not one of them.)īelow we present 11 films, a mix of dramas and documentaries, that are far better elegies for the rural Americans they depict than the one currently getting all the buzz. ![]() There are so many better films that tackle the subject matter of rural American identity that we felt compelled to round them up for anyone who wants cinematic insight into hillbillies, rednecks, and rural life generally. What’s odd is that it’s not like there’s a shortage of films that Howard and his production team could have cribbed. Outside of a few pointed shots of bricked-up buildings and storefronts with peeling paint, the film has remarkably little to say about either the hillbilly life of its title or hillbillies themselves and their struggle to survive. Vance, dredges up a litany of cringe-y tropes and stereotypes about poverty, drug use, classism, and fading small-town America. In the name of presenting an empathetic view of the Appalachian community where it’s set, Ron Howard’s film, based on the bestselling memoir by lawyer J.D. Let’s not mince words: Netflix’s new Oscar-bait Hillbilly Elegy is not the ode to vanishing rural American life it seems to want to be.
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