Critic Reviews
66
Metascore
Generally Favorable
positive
10(71%)
mixed
3(21%)
negative
1(7%)
Showing 14 Critic Reviews
100
Jersey Shore may be the hyped example of trashy onscreen “reality,” but this portrait of an upstate working-poor family forsakes guilty-pleasure exploitation and simply wows you in every other way.
83
Manages to excavate enough universal pathos from the mundane to find something truly extraordinary in the ordinary.
75
October Country doesn't really have a point, or a story, but it's an almost unbearably vivid portrait of four generations in a single working-class family.
75
The beauty of October Country, beside its artful images, is how it compresses the windblown fortunes of working-class America into the fallen leaves of one forlorn family.
75
This is the face of dysfunction. Apparently alcohol and drugs are not involved, except perhaps with some of the missing men. The drug here is despair. They seem to treat it with cigarettes.
70
October Country feels at once personal and objective, a fascinating hybrid of two important tendencies in the modern documentary.
70
A beautiful evocation of a time and place -- Mohawk Valley in upstate New York, spanning from one Halloween to the next -- and a loving but unflinching probing of the lives of Mosher's family in the course of a year.
70
There's rancor here, but also unexpected tenderness.
67
In digging deeper into the stories behind the junk--many of which involve the drug problems, legal problems, custody battles, cycles of abuse, and post-traumatic stress disorders of Mosher’s own family--October Country veers awfully close to exploitation.
63
What results is both real and surreal, giving and self indulgent. That’s the country we all live in.
