Lake City: Critic Reviews

The story is as impersonal as it is labored.

When Sissy Spacek speaks her cliched lines in the mediocre screenplay of Lake City, her delivery lends them a resonance that is not in the written words.

Added to the general torpidity and twangy tropes of this Southern family drama is the discomfort of watching a natural actor force it.

Only natural spitfire Spacek, as the pickup-driving mom of the land, feels fresh.

There is very little wasted motion, to be sure, but also very little real-life like ambience.

As for Sissy Spacek, I can't think of a sounder role to reflect the unique qualities that make her so special.

Moore and Hill's script plunges [Sissy] Spacek in a mawkish stew of banality and improbability composed of bits and pieces of earlier roles.

One of those Deep Dark Secret movies, the dull indie Lake City combines a wholly uninteresting family mystery with a wholly unconvincing crime drama.

A convoluted, discombobulated take on a small-town drama, Lake City shifts gears so often it never gets out of the driveway.

...ultimately establishes itself as a compelling little drama...

It is phony, manipulative films like this that make people line up for Paul Blart: Mall Cop.

When Hill and Moore leave story and characters behind to veer off into suspenseless chases through cornfields, one wonders if the era of earnest American drama may be coming to a close.

With all the high-profile movies blasting into theaters at this time of year, Lake City will probably get lost in the shuffle. That won't be a tragedy.

The only thing saving Lake City from total ridiculousness is Spacek.

Mother and son have an uneasy bond that should be familiar to anyone who has ever seen a movie in which a child's room has been preserved and locked tight.

A movie that just didn't really ring true.

An interesting little film.

The astonishingly inept finish could serve as a primer in screenwriting classes on how not to wind up a family drama.

An intermittently admirable but largely incongruous work that suggests not only divergent sensibilities on the part of the two neophyte filmmakers, but a certain indecisiveness regarding their core audience.

"Lake City" is a throwaway film with a cast it doesn't deserve.

All of these movies uneasily coexist under the umbrella title of Lake City, which is a shame because Sissy Spacek can be found wasting a genuinely affecting performance in this mess.

The filmmakers rely excessively on a repeated dreamlike flashback and on foliage, fields and sunsets to remind us 'we are all part of a greater universe.'

The real shame is the waste of Spacek. She's an American treasure who doesn't work nearly enough; to see this star make a rare appearance, only to wither among such emotional cheap shots, is the one thing in Lake City that will genuinely make you weep.

The movie has an earnest tone, and a burnished golden glow that's pleasing to the eye, but the characters have no life beyond their immediate problems, and the actions the plot requires them to take to resolve them.

Quaintly shot and paced, not unlike Shotgun Stories, but insanely over-written, Lake City dumps on audiences a plot that consists of 500-some-odd puzzle pieces that all come together exactly as you expect.