Photo: Courtney Hunt's Frozen River
One year after Christopher Zalla's Padre Nuestro took the top prize at Sundance, another dubious mix of suspense and social melodrama, Courtney Hunt's Frozen River, does the same. Call it Sundanceploitation, only this one is a more trite and noxious brew—less intuitive, shamelessly manipulative, screechily written, and amateurishly performed. Hunt's direction can be striking, as in a searching pan from the ground of the film's weather-beaten New York-Canuck borderland to the exhausted face of Melissa Leo, who sheds tears almost as if on cue (though not disingenuously), but her writing hinges painfully on overdetermined exposition, leaden metaphor, grade-school symbolism, and cliché characterization. Ed Gonzalez
One year after Christopher Zalla's Padre Nuestro took the top prize at Sundance, another dubious mix of suspense and social melodrama, Courtney Hunt's Frozen River, does the same. Call it Sundanceploitation, only this one is a more trite and noxious brew—less intuitive, shamelessly manipulative, screechily written, and amateurishly performed. Hunt's direction can be striking, as in a searching pan from the ground of the film's weather-beaten New York-Canuck borderland to the exhausted face of Melissa Leo, who sheds tears almost as if on cue (though not disingenuously), but her writing hinges painfully on overdetermined exposition, leaden metaphor, grade-school symbolism, and cliché characterization. Ed Gonzalez
