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"  Sundance has been on a roll with its Grand Jury Prize winners\u2014 first the sleeper hit Frozen River in 2008, then the surprise Oscar nominee Precious in 2009, and now this year&amp;#039;s Winter&amp;#039;s Bone. Cowritten and directed by Debra Granik from Daniel Woodrell&amp;#039;s novel of the same name, the movie has triggered excited buzz, and no wonder: Opening next month and featuring another beleaguered, indomitable heroine, it&amp;#039;s a stunning piece of filmmaking and storytelling, with extraordinary character depth. Winter&amp;#039;s Bone is an ordeal narrative with a mystery at its center. Its teenage protagonist, Ree Dolly, played by 19-year-old Jennifer Lawrence, must track down her vanished father while taking care of her little brother and sister and their silent, shell-shocked mother. Whether or not Winter&amp;#039;s Bone makes next year&amp;#039;s Oscars, it should land high on plenty of other 10-best lists, and Lawrence and John Hawkes, who plays Ree&amp;#039;s fearsome uncle, Teardrop, give performances as memorable as those of Gabourey Sidibe and Mo&amp;#039;Nique. The story&amp;#039;s setting among Missouri&amp;#039;s Ozark mountain clans could hardly be further from mid-&amp;#039;80s Harlem. But as with Precious, there are times in Winter&amp;#039;s Bone when, following in Ree&amp;#039;s footsteps, you find yourself walking through hell, only to discover that in all its peril and strangeness, it&amp;#039;s an electrifying place to be. The characters who dominate Winter&amp;#039;s Bone are a people apart: hard-core hill folk, insular, interrelated for generations, living by their own harsh rules, and contemptuous of the outside world. The tradition of brewing moonshine, which was never the safest occupation\u2014stills blew up, G-men came calling\u2014has given way to the far more devastating meth trade. Ree&amp;#039;s father, Jessup, is both a cooker and an addict. Using their house and land to post bail after a bust, he&amp;#039;s disappeared. When Ree learns the family will lose everything if he doesn&amp;#039;t make his court date a week away, she sets out to find him, going from family to family, only to meet baffling silence and eventually much worse. Filmmakers have long felt free to caricature this particular sliver of society, whether as comical hillbilly rubes, sleazy white trash, or Gothic grotesques. (John Boorman&amp;#039;s much-praised 1972 Deliverance hit some kind of trifecta with a deformed albino child; a mute, cross-eyed banjo player; and a macho redneck rapist with a taste for short, fat city men.) By contrast, Granik got to know the locals before she started shooting, winning their trust and casting them as extras and in small parts. The payoff is enormous. You feel as if you&amp;#039;ve entered a secret world that&amp;#039;s been hiding in plain sight: utterly alive, dangerous, both ugly and beautiful, and at times horrifying. With few exceptions, the women in this movie are tough and strong, but the men rule so completely that their violence is a given. When Teardrop\u2014a prison moniker if ever there was one\u2014tells Ree not to look for her father and she refuses, he grabs her neck with the speed of a snake and drives his point home with a thumb pressed hard against her throat. No matter: The minute he&amp;#039;s gone, she takes off. The scenes between Hawkes and Lawrence are some of the most powerful in Winter&amp;#039;s Bone. Hawkes is best known for his current work on Lost, as the basset-eyed, comic dad in Miranda July&amp;#039;s Me and You and Everyone We Know, and as Timothy Olyphant&amp;#039;s soft-spoken, railthin business partner in the famously foul-mouthed Deadwood. His Teardrop is skinny too, but in a way that brings piano wire to mind, not weakness. Just when your response to him has degenerated into hatred, he reveals facets of himself that can only be called redemptive. This role is his richest one yet, so it says a lot about Lawrence that she holds her own with him throughout, never seeming to break a sweat. She has three years of television to her name and made an impression opposite Charlize Theron in Guillermo Arriaga&amp;#039;s little-seen 2008 drama The Burning Plain. Now Jodie Foster has cast her along with Mel Gibson, Anton Yelchin, and Foster herself in this fall&amp;#039;s The Beaver. Lawrence is a striking beauty, but in Granik&amp;#039;s film she doesn&amp;#039;t play down her good looks so much as blow right past them. Her Ree is all about authority and purpose. She moves like an athlete, bats away male sexual advances with ruthless put-downs, and saves her tenderness for the people who need her most. At this point, she&amp;#039;s the only parent her family has. The power of blood ties runs through Winter&amp;#039;s Bone; it&amp;#039;s a subtext, most often brought to the surface by Ree. She invokes it again and again as she seeks help in finding a father who has snapped every bond. &amp;quot;There&amp;#039;s got to be some blood between us,&amp;quot; she tells a woman who has turned her away. &amp;quot;I thought family was supposed to mean something.&amp;quot; Later, as she sits on the sagging porch steps with her siblings, her brother\u2014who shares Ree&amp;#039;s courage but is too small to do much with it\u2014anxiously asks if she&amp;#039;s going to leave him and their sister. Her answer has a beauty as tough as the landscape. No, she says, looking surprised, &amp;quot;I&amp;#039;d be lost without the weight of the two of you on my back.&amp;quot; Has a better definition of family love ever been written? Click here to see more film picks from Karen Durbin.          Sea of Love  Colin Farrell and Alicja Bachleda have a delicate, sure-footed chemistry in Ondine, Neil Jordan&amp;#039;s enchanting love story of an Irish fisherman and the mysterious sprite who gets caught in his net. Jordan (Mona Lisa, The Crying Game) expertly mingles whimsy with grit\u2014the fisherman&amp;#039;s young daughter is on dialysis, and terrifying brutes stalk Ondine\u2014to create beguiling entertainment. Photo: Courtesy of Magnolia Pictures.           Going Solo  What if one of those hotshots Michael Douglas plays so well (Traffic, Wall Street 1 and 2) blew his money and marriage (to Susan Sarandon) on a scam and went into a free fall he couldn&amp;#039;t acknowledge? The answer is the darkly comic Solitary Man, with Douglas creepily charismatic as he bags every woman in sight (Mary- Louise Parker, Imogen Poots) on his race to the bottom. Photo: Courtesy of Anchor Bay Films.           Buddy Pic  Ken Loach (The Wind That Shakes the Barley) has fun with Looking for Eric, a screwball romantic dramedy as lovable as The Full Monty. Steve Evets is soulful as a lovelorn divorced dad resigned to misery\u2014until his favorite football superstar, Eric Cantona (nicely playing himself), shows up in his bedroom with suave, sardonic tips on how to dig out. Photo: Courtesy of IFC Films.  "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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