October Country [38 points / 3 votes]
"A quiet, absorbing portrait of an American family as unassuming as it is unexpectedly moving, October Country is nonfiction filmmaking at its finest. Director Michael Palmieri, with photographer Donal Mosher (who stays off camera), elliptically tracks the impoverished Mosher clan of Mohawk Valley, New York over roughly a year's time, from one Halloween to the next. He shifts his focus from an elderly couple to their daughter, then to their daughter's daughter, who has a newborn baby of her own. While he never telegraphs his intent, his patient, observational style gradually expands our knowledge of these people, cluing us into the mistakes they've made and the specters of the past that still haunt them. Palmieri illustrates the Moshers' struggles with poetic evocations of time's passage, and of its lasting effects; he lingers on the ghosted image of fireworks and the whirring of a light fixture, the slow drift of cigarette smoke and, most achingly, an old home movie of the eldest Mosher slow-dancing with his granddaughter on Christmas morning. The filmmakers' interests here are universal; they carefully record cycles of life, linking one woman's bad decisions to her upbringing with a mother who was victim to similar patterns, and finally back to her mother's father, haunted by ghosts of the Vietnam War. The film's depiction is of a family that could only be American, their misfortunes rooted in poor economic standing and in the sacrifices they've made to protect the freedoms of this country—as beautifully symbolized in an image of a waving American flag shot through with rays of sunshine. It's a modest film of disarming power, so precisely capturing the lives of its several characters that you'll feel like you spent a year with them yourself." - Sam C. Mac
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