Winter's Bone Review

Messages: The movie is relentlessly downbeat, but it does have a positive slant. The heroine is only 17 and has found herself in charge of raising her two younger siblings. Given a difficult problem to solve, she musters up courage, faces her fears, and marches into danger. There's also a secondary, but equally powerful message about the importance of family.

Role models: No parent would ever wish for their teen to be in Ree's situation. However, Ree is impressively brave, resourceful, and selfless. She's wise beyond her years and seems to know how to navigate difficult situations in this quasi-criminal community, but she's above doing anything illegal or unhealthy to herself (with one exception).

Violence: Very little graphic violence, but the movie is filled with the simmering, realistic threat of violence. Characters are always flashing guns, and animals are shot, killed and skinned (for eating). A character teaches two young kids how to shoot guns safely. More than once, adult characters threaten children and teens. One adult character wraps his hands around a teenage girl's throat. The teenage girl is later beaten up, but this occurs offscreen. We only see her cuts and bruises. Finally, there's a somewhat gruesome sequence involving cutting the hands off of a corpse with a chainsaw; the corpse is under water and not much is actually visible, but the scene is powerfully suggestive.

Sex: Some very infrequent language and mild suggestion.

Language: Language is not constant, but is occasionally very strong, including a few uses of "f--k" and many uses of "s--t." Otherwise, we hear "ass" several times, and "t-ts" once. We also hear "balls," "go to hell," "son of a bitch," and "damn."

Consumerism: Not an issue

Drinking, drugs and smoking: Most of the characters are drug makers and drug dealers, except for the main characters. The teen girl very deliberately avoids drugs and frowns upon them, except for one scene in which she accepts a "doobie." The other characters seem to make their own "crank" in homemade meth labs. We don't see any of this onscreen, but there are many references to it, including the terms "cooking" and "cooking crank." An older character snorts coke onscreen, and smokes several cigarettes. A character offers a "line" and to "blow some smoke." And another character mentions marijuana. Some drinking and smoking.