Junebug: Critic Reviews

You may find yourself caught entrancingly off guard by the conflicting shades of love, suspicion, tradition, and mystery that infuse this tale of lost innocence, deep roots, and what it means to come from the world of the South.

Phil Morrison's wise, bittersweet, beautifully acted comedy about a Southern homecoming envelops us in texture of a world the movies rarely visit.

Junebug has the feel of a good short story or novella.

It's a quiet, funny, moving triumph, the kind of movie that gives 'interesting' a good name.

With its wise understanding of the magnetic pull (and invisible polarities) of family, Junebug is an auspicious debut for Morrison.

Junebug is a textbook case of filmmakers who can't make up their minds about their characters; it's a failure of nerve disguised as dramatic ambiguity.

Morrison mostly succeeds in his attempt to show how secret knowledge can result in sudden violence as well as long-term, lived-in acceptance.

Morrison and his cast approach this familiar story with such understated intelligence, we don't even realize they've pulled the rug out from under the audience until we've tumbled to the floor, cliches scattered in pieces around us.

Thanks to newfangled things like TV and the Internet, small-town folks aren't as uniformly insulated as director Phil Morrison and screenwriter Angus McLachlan would have us believe.

With Junebug, it's what's inside that counts.

Junebug is a great film because it is a true film. It humbles other films that claim to be about family secrets and eccentricities.

Adams is so pure-hearted and touching that she redeems the film, just as her character redeems, or tries to, the blighted lives around her.

This brilliantly detailed, richly painted portrait lingers long in the memory.

Junebug gets under your skin.

Features an astounding performance from comparative unknown Amy Adams that is all the more satisfying in that it doesn't overwhelm the film.

Thanks to Adams' performance and strong story, it makes for a mildly entertaining Southern-fried experience.

All the acting is so good, and the setting is so rightly observed, that Junebug emerges as one of the best pictures of the year.

Helmer Morrison and scripter Angus MacLachlan merely hint at long-festering estrangement that provides an ominously percolating undercurrent throughout scenes in the modest but spacious family home.

Phil Morrison does an impressive job with his big-screen directorial debut, although we can't figure out how he wants us to take Madeleine.

The adult tensions and the tone take us to a place remembered so vividly that even if we don't know this corner of the South, we've somehow lived there or at least passed through.

A quiet journey into the heartland, and the heart.

...one of many reasons to love Junebug is how often it offers us spaces to fill in ourselves, the faith it shows in handing us small puzzles -- Eugene's hand-carved bird, for instance -- to chuckle over or think on afterward.

In the end, we not only believe in the men and women populating the film, but feel along with them. By offering that experience, Junebug has done its job.

It's sometimes said that Southerners rejoice in their eccentrics and put them out on the porch for full display, rather than push them in the closet. Indeed, the filmmakers have given us a nicely filled porch.