Leave No Trace

Leave No Trace is, at times, heartbreaking, but it's also filled with glimpses of almost casual human kindness, throwaway moments of good will and inclusion piercing through what could be the bleakest of tales.

Leave No Trace is a universal, unforgettable experience.

Granik works simply, but she doesn’t forego artistry. She’s made a film of grace and power, a story of people lost and found in America that often shows us at our noble and humble best. How rare and refreshing that is these days.

In Leave No Trace, director Debra Granik continues to refine a style of tranquil intensity. The film's images have a rapt and pared-down power, with emphases that are never quite where you expect them to be.

Leave No Trace’s acute sense of place and how people relate to it makes for great, emotion-laden naturalism.

Subtle but assured to the end, Granik’s film is all undertow, but it irresistibly grabs you.

There’s a listless, almost meandering nature to the story. The film’s conflict is clear — this is no way to raise a child, and allowed to continue in this fashion, Will risks both his life and Tom’s — and yet there’s no sense of where the script it headed, and no urgency to its resolution.

Leave No Trace is an incredible film that follows the life of a man and his daughter who live in isolation, away from society, in the woods. As you would expect they have a really close relationship as they only have eachothers company, and both deliver fantastic performances that make their characters feel like real people. Unfortunately they get found in the woods and are taken in by police to begin living in an actual home surrounded by other people. This is when the movie begins to explore why they prefer to live in the woods rather than being apart of society. Its a very real and personal movie that almost feels like it is depicting the lives of a real father and daughter. Its a movie for people who love the wilderness and have a desire to get away from civilization.

Ben Foster and Thomasin McKenzie may be the most steadfast on-screen duo this year in terms of performances, but beyond that, there's not much else to Debra Granik's wayfaring wilderness drama, "Leave No Trace." It's not necessarily as though nothing happens, but the characterization and direction makes it feel as though nothing has. The pacing is trying, the movie never really builds to anything, and there are several plot threads left unattended by the time its closing credits roll. All in all, it's a nice-looking and well acted ride, but nothing more than that.

The scenery was beautiful, the story interesting, the acting good. But like with Winter's Bone, I just wasn't totally buying it. It was hard to know how old the girl, Tom, is. 12, 13, 14? At first she talks like a nine or ten year old, but we can see she is older than that. She's not menstruating? So let's say she is 12. She's an "old soul" as the social worker said of her. But she is still a kid. I'm just not sure about these movies that are completely reliant on self possessed, motherless girls. I had the same reaction to the book, Secret Life of Bees. And bees are featured in this movie as some kind of metaphor for life. The story was way too idealized. Motherless girls are not self possessed. They grow up in many was dissociated from their own feelings. The film was beautifully made. I just wish the story had more realism to the inner life of the girl. We don't do our girls a favor when we don't tell the truth of female experience.

The problem with this film is Foster's character: poorly cast and poorly written. For the film to work, the viewer needs some degree of empathy for Foster, despite the poor decisions, yet it provides none. The man is beyond selfish; he's a drug dealer, a thief, a child abuser, and not so hot at living off the land. I was rooting for him to be crushed by a tree within the first 10 mins of the film so that his daughter coukd be free of him.

very disappointing. It's flat and dry. And turned the lush allure of the fantastic scenery surrounding the main characters as drab as an English suburb. It's the opposite of that nice movie Mr. Fantastic with Viggo Mortensen. The only good cinematic moments happen at the start and end of the movie with gorgeous photography. The rest is the typical example of how cinema ruins a book by trying to be "realistic", "telling a story" or understand the "psychology" of its main characters. A film will never beat the written word in that respect. Ben Forster was especially bad in that film imho.