The Evening Hour

King's touching, if muddled, drama succeeds at dignifying a subset of this country's working class.

The Evening Hour falls back on clichés, telling its story with a palpable sense of distance from the characters, from their struggles, and from the world they inhabit.

The movie opens and closes with appreciative pans of the verdant hills that suggest the heartland will live on. But what comes in the middle doesn't quite hold together.

In spite of its strikingly lived-in sense of place, The Evening Hour's melodramatic storytelling works against that verisimilitude.

This is one of those films in which people on the edge of poverty and battling addiction still look like they walked off a Hollywood set.

It's an atmospheric portrait which, while leaving several key story strands under-explored, does convey a vivid sense of the support system which powers and protects these lives lived on the periphery.

The landscapes establish a sufficient mood, but one also finds it difficult to become completely engulfed in the storytelling by the visual aesthetics alone.

Lingering... rural elegy... As with King's documentary work and his first fiction feature, "Here" (2011), the stately glimpse of place and space express as much yearning as the most disappointed yet hopeful human heart...

There is potential from director Braden King and the entire cast is game to take on their roles, but it all just doesn't come together.

The Evening Hour is a thematically rich character study that succeeds despite uneven pacing and predictable storytelling.