Hale County This Morning, This Evening's reviews
Media reviews
New York Times
'Hale County This Morning, This Evening' is not a long film, but it contains whole worlds.
The Playlist
Like life itself, 'Hale County This Morning, This Evening' doesn't lend itself to immediate comprehension. It's to Ross credit that his work remains so thoroughly accessible and engrossing regardless.
Los Angeles Times
'Hale County This Morning, This Evening' is a poetic documentary with a gift for making enrapturing imagery out of what sound like ordinary, everyday events.
Roger Ebert
As a record of African-American imagery, it's not just an evaluation of how we are seen, it's also a corrective that replaces stereotypes with visual poetry.
The Hollywood Reporter
At its strongest, the film feels like kin to Kirsten Johnson?s great Cameraperson (2016), a free-associative nonfiction memoir comprised mostly of B-roll and personal footage. Though the subject here isn?t Ross himself (despite a few offscreen aural appearances) but an entire community that, in both micro- and macrocosmic senses, has remained historically unacknowledged and unseen.
The A.V. Club
If Ross had embraced anything like a narrative line, would it have taken away from the elemental imagery of his brief, unconventional film? One can?t really tackle life and what it means on both a personal and social level without prying into the people who live it. Ross keeps his distance?and in doing so, keeps Hale County?s potential at an arm?s length.
Variety
The movie has won year-end attention (it made this year?s Oscar documentary short list), and once you let yourself glide onto its wavelength, it?s got a cosmically becalmed addictive quality.
The New Yorker
Though made modestly and intimately, the film embodies a vast conceptual and aesthetic ambition.
Festival Internacional de Cine de Lanzarote