Frozen River: Critic Reviews

In Frozen River, [Melissa] Leo's acting has a brittle severity and power. Every moment of her performance feels torn from experience, and so does the movie, which finds a suspense in broken lives that are hanging in the balance.

Courtney Hunta(TM)s somber film Frozen River ventures deep into the trenches where hard-working Americans struggle to put food on the table.

Leo and Upham give performances of great conviction and the film is bold and uncliched: especially the matter-of-fact treatment of guns.

A Sundance hit that is both absorbing and bleak, Frozen River is anchored by powerful performances, believable scenarios and excellent writing.

Made with uncommon skill and assurance, the film never succumbs to rank sentimentality, but it manages to get at the nuances of human relationships.

Frozen River does what too many independent American movies only pretend to do: Takes you to an unnoticed corner of our country and shows what it's like to actually live there.

The gritty Leo is gaunt and harried, but tough company to travel with.

This is a debut feature, though you'd never know it from the filmmaker's commandingly confident style, or from the heartbreaking beauty -- heartbreaking, then heartmending -- of Melissa Leo's performance.

It moves and it heals, finding hints of redemption in the jagged face of life.

All in all, Frozen River is gripping stuff.

Frozen River is one of those rare independent films that knows precisely what it intends, and what the meaning of the story is.

An urgent and incomparably moving first feature from Courtney Hunt.

An impressive first feature by writer/director Courtney Hunt, Frozen River boasts considerable suspense-movie tension and a compelling emotional journey for its foreground characters.

Frozen River isn't just a good movie made by a woman; it's a good movie on anyone's terms, one of the year's best. To find hope beneath this ice, in this ugly terrain, is to dream big.

Frozen River, a story of abject desperation, feels so real and immediate that it plays almost like a documentary.

Should prove thematically and spiritually invigorating for adult audiences with a feeling for the heroism of everyday life.

Unafraid to show herself weathered by the cold, harsh elements and never working to make auds love her, [Star Meliss] Leo builds the kind of perf that invites concentration, and then high respect.

A low-budget triumph for director Courtney Hunt that won the grand jury prize at Sundance, Frozen River is a thriller set in upstate New York anchored by an unforgettable performance by veteran character actress Melissa Leo.

Courtney Hunt's Frozen River is the first great film of the fall. It has great actors playing vivid characters in a setting that makes for a clash of cultures.

It's fair to say that Hunt's first full-length feature, though uneven at times, holds the promise of better things to come.

Frozen River let me forget I was watching a movie, something that didn't happen often in 2008.

The miracle of filmmaker Courtney Hunt's tense, carefully understated debut is that it is made better by its few flights of fancy.

Frozen River asks is how much that communality will mean in the context of an uncaring, unforgiving world. It is a powerful question, and the film answers it in the best way possible.

Melissa Leo's Oscar-nominated performance as a mother not above illegal business, but resolutely clinging to honesty and not giving into hypocrisy, is terrific. Hope comes from hard sacrifice in a finale proving sometimes possessions are our blessings.