best movie i've ever seen.

A movie that not only functions as a solid scarefest but a razor-sharp satire.

The story, direction, characters, and writing/dialogue is akin to taking a tranquilizer shot to the neck, but everything else was so well done.

All of these films share one commonality, that being a kind of emotional center that humanizes a cast of monsters.

This movie is rather a long haul as it lacks any narrative drive, there are no real dramatic highs and lows, it just tends to drift along at a far too leisurely pace. The performance are uniformly good but the script is often crass and, as the Director is striving for a natural feel, the actors often battle to make themselves heard against the elements and the sounds of wildlife. The biggest impression is made by Alfre Woodard who was Oscar nominated, counting towards four nominations for this film in total, which was a remarkable achievement. There is a good story to be told here and it is well photographed and nice to look at so if you're in a really laid-back mood you may well enjoy it.

The locations are great, the photography is fairly good, and the sound recording is realistic, however there is little else that is very positive about this film. Rip Torn delivers quite a strong performance, and Dana Hill has her moments, but the rest of the performers do nothing much, that including Steenburgen, whose character comes over as rather cold. The pacing is too leisurely to be enticing, and the film feels like it has a sugarcoating to it. The surface looks great, but it is not too deep, and therefore it is hard to speak of it as being anything better than ordinary. Ritt has done far better stuff in his time.

No, I don't think Cross Creek will ever be put up there with Kane or Casablanca, but for some reason I made a connection with this movie the first time I saw it 20 years ago, and it remains one of my favorite films even today.Every creative person goes through the struggle to find their voice, and Cross Creek is about a city-bred writer who runs away to the country to live an ascetic life with her typewriter. She expects her isolation and alienation to "prod the muses" but instead finds these new people and this new land to draw her in until they and it become the soul of her writing.The natural, understated tone of the film allowed for a human resonance I've rarely seen in mainstream Hollywood fare. And while Mary Steenburgen and Peter Coyote are perfectly fine, Rip Torn and Alfre Woodard's performances absolutely floored me. They respectively brought Marsh Turner and Geechee to life with such abandon and clarity, it's some of the finest acting I've witnessed on film, period.I revisit Cross Creek every few years and it always holds up stylistically (Leonard Rosenman's score is timeless). Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings symbolizes America itself, in my opinion, so concerned with pleasing its own, yet progressively exposed to a foreign world that ultimately will shape its real identity.It's a universally human story and, like I said before, I really connect with this little film, and appreciate Director Martin Ritt's courage in making it the way he did. I can't guarantee that others will necessarily feel the same way, but I always recommend Cross Creek to friends, be they creatives or not.

Mary Steenbergen is at her best with this. Low key but strong willed woman with a love for the countryside and sense of what is right. She faces of with Rip Torn's gruff cracker over a pig, and he ends up inviting her to the barbeque. Heartwarming and heartbreaking.