". . .O'Brien, too, is a man with a plan; his way of entrusting the story to real people gives [his movies] surprising depths. We do not get a sugared take on pastoral virtues; we get living people -- cranky, odd, sad, generous -- co-creating a cinema in which real American lives breathe through the pores of the narrative. This quietly revolutionary moviemaking is never sentimental; there's a sharp, life-weathered Vermont tang to the life we see... In the early days of movies, filmmakers like D.W.Griffith and Buster Keaton and Harold Lloyd took their cameras out into the fresh American countryside. O'Brien is bringing their kind of oxygen back into narrative, fictional cinema.

Donald Lyons
Drama Critic,
The Wall Street Journal