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9

Too experimental and unfocused for me. Would have preferred an actual narrative or some sort of story, rather than a slice of life portrait that feels like a montage of footage shot in the same area.

1

I have no jokes to make about this one. It is just a beautifully shot, smartly edited portrait.

13

expands domestic rural psychedelia into communal-tapestry psychedelia, incorporating the life of the land & the extractive/exploitive economies which dwell upon/within it, the daily socio-economic, cultural and family lives of the people whose ancestors were forcibly brought to that place to engage in harvesting/extracting economies and largely still do. Hale County This Morning, This Evening is messy and discontinuous, threads are picked up and put down, people are born, people die, people go to school, people go to work, people go to church, they hang out and just spend time with each other.

a lot of what i watch are exploitation and horror movies. that is the root of the aesthetic and cultural tradition from which i hail, but slasher movies are…

2

A presence of being. Just living, just being. Instead of looking at we look from, instead of being tourists we are neighbors, instead of asking questions we live their answers. It's easy to forget this, but uninformed voyeurism can tell us more lies than truth.

Instead we experience the systematic forgetfulness, the past that never fade away, we gaze into Hale County not through scripted cameras nor edited responses but a direct perspective where people, places, distractions and attractions are all juxtaposed into moments that say more than words ever could.

Not a strict narrative but not a non-narrative, rather a loose one that threads the whole piece into not a plot, not a story, but just life as rarely, truly shared this way. Empathy is born through lived-experiences, and film rarely lets us live this freely; let yourself be a resident of Hale County, at least for a little while.

Review by karen h. ★★★★½ Liked

just beautiful

6

The primary function of a great documentary is to capture life authentically without influencing its subjects with the presence of the camera or the documenter. Expansive, contemplative and intimately pensive, filmmaker RaMell Ross takes us on a wistful wandering into the lives of a two Black American men and their families in Hale County This Morning, This Evening. Taking a close look at the past, residing in the present and striving for a better future; the film is equal parts a work of vérité realism as it is meditative sublimity. Ross gives us a glimpse into the lives of people too often disregarded in the realm of documentary filmmaking and he paints a portrait of an entire racial and geographical landscape,…

4

It will only be inevitable when a large amount of folks find 'Hale County This Morning, This Evening' to be irredeemably languid. For those who felt restless when Rooney Mara ate a pie for 5 minutes straight, you will probably give up on Hale County rather quickly.

It's a shame, because this is my favorite new film I've seen since Andrea Arnold's American Honey, one modern enigma that just so happened to land in my Top 10 of all time.

Hale County is composed of several movements that achieve nothing if not to serve as a complete understanding of a community's way of life and reason for being. Movies can be great entertainment, wonderful technical achievements, or emotional melancholic weepies…

7

A very particular sort of camera is at work in Hale County This Morning, This Evening. It peers from unconventional angles, lingers on images longer than they at first seem to deserve, and generally offers a perspective that is at once unremarkable, given the everyday subject matter, and revealing.

Review: www.larsenonfilm.com/hale-county-this-morning-this-evening

2

A contemplative film that explores Hale County, Alabama from director RaMell Ross. With Apichatpong Weerasethakul as the creative advisor, we know how things are going to play out. Personally, it's not my kind of movie, as I prefer more of a story (and a point). For instance, the Sandra Bland documentary was extremely strong and moving. Hale County had some great moments as well as some good photography. My favorite was probably the lightning storm which was poetic. It captured other moments in the lives of a tight-knit community.

Vegan alert:
-A car almost hit a cat and a man laughed about how he almost hit the cat.
-Catfish factory discussion
-Meat was featured cooking on the stove

Review by sofyan ★★★½ Liked

- This was mesmerizing.
- Impressively beautiful.
- Poetic.
- Great shot.
- Beatiful cinematography.
- There are some beautiful images here.
- Another great Academy nominee.

Review by Brother Bro ★★★★

RaMell Ross has a wonderful eye for beauty and great editing / filmmaking sensibilities all around. There’s no real narrative here to latch onto but I enjoyed losing myself in this community and letting the images wash over me. Taking narrative out of the equation in this way seems to elevate truths that are otherwise glossed over or fabricated. There’s no need to make meaning out of a person’s struggles, or justify a lengthy take of a toddler cheerily bumbling around a living room. 

Watched this in anticipation of Nickel Boys and I’m stoked to see how Ross’s instincts will translate to a much larger narrative piece. I expect great things

5

Whenever someone proposes the idea of a person of color playing a classic character like James Bond, Batman, or Superman on the big screen, I cringe a little on the inside. And I've really struggled to figure out why. I'm sure that it would be the opportunity of a lifetime for any POC who would be chosen for the role. And there are more than enough capable non-white actors to fill those roles and deliver a performance worthy of those characters legacy. But it just doesn't sit well with me. And that's the power of motion pictures in a nutshell. They have the ability to project your image onto the screen and give you something to look up to. But…