On the small screen, AMC’s Breaking Bad has shined a light on the production of methamphetamine, and wrung much drama from the heightened stakes of a seemingly regular family man’s descent into moral and criminal contravention. Writer-director David Pomes’ effectively grimy Cook County takes a look at the ravaging effects of the same drug from a user’s point-of-view, detailing the familial chaos surrounding three generations of addicts living in rural East Texas. A gritty, pungent drama with some nicely attuned performances, the film is well worth seeking out for fans of off-the-beaten-path independent fare.

At the movie’s center is Tommy, aka Bump (Anson Mount, above left), a perpetually strung-out addict and meth cook who lives with his girlfriend Lucy (Polly Cole) and a series of other burn-outs who seem to come and go. The ruination of his own life might not be so bad, but Bump’s six-year-old daughter Deandra (Makenna Fitzsimmons) is also caught up in the mix, and a continuous victim of his curious combination of obliviousness and over-protectiveness. Bump’s teenage nephew, Abe (Ryan Donowho), tries to look out for his younger cousin as best he can, but lives in constant fear of his uncle’s violent rages and irrational paranoia. He’s older, but no less stuck and a victim of his circumstances than Deandra.

An uptick of hope arrives when Bump’s older brother and Abe’s dad, Sonny (Xander Berkeley, above right), returns home after a two-and-a-half-year absence. He’s gone clean and sober, and unbeknownst to Bump has also done a stint in prison, and is thus required to check in with a parole officer. Abe at first welcomes his father back, but then old resentments come bubbling up. Trying to finally do right by his son, Sonny wonders if his brother is too far gone, and if so whether it’s too late to extricate the rest of his loved ones from the dark clutches of drugs.

The winner of the prestigious Audience Award at the SXSW Film Festival, Cook County is a solidly constructed little film that casts its lot with a group of game actors. If Mount — emaciated and sporting a scruffy beard that makes him look like a crazed gold rush ancestor of Daniel Day-Lewis — sometimes feels like he’s overdialing his accented impression of Matthew McConaughey, he certainly nails the flitting mindset of a drug addict, in which tangential thoughts collide and battle for mangled articulation. Donowho, who kind of recalls Lou Taylor Pucci, exudes a basic sympathetic nature. The underrated Berkeley, meanwhile, particularly shines as a fundamentally decent but in-over-his-head guy trying desperately to pay down the sins of his past. Crucially, there is humanity here in all these characters, regardless of their sins and shortcomings.

Director of photography Brad Rushing and production designer James Fowler, meanwhile, abet Pomes in creating a movie with a grungy authenticity. Sweat pours off of almost every character in every scene (Mount probably never wears a shirt during the entire film), and the rank aroma of frantic hopelessness can almost be smelled coming off the screen. That things end badly is no great surprise, but there is hope in the pinched battle for redemption that unfolds in Cook County. This may not be a pleasant slice of Americana, but it is unfortunately part of our modern collective story. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here; for more information on the movie, meanwhile, click here. (Hannover House, R, 94 minutes)

A refined and not entirely disagreeable slice of square-jawed drama with the smooth, uncomplicated contours of film made to please the broadest possible audience, Steven Spielberg‘s War Horse clings steadfastly to very old-fashioned — and sometimes torpid — notions of emotional engagement. With its episodic stabs at poignancy, there’s not much to assail with fury here, but neither is there much about which to get passionately excited or interested.

Notwithstanding the well received nature of its source material, and the array of accomplished below-the-line artisanship brought to bear in its adaptation, War Horse — a self-consciously epic story, set against a sweeping canvas of rural England and Europe during World War I, about a teenager (Jeremy Irvine) and his connection to and unlikely reunion with the family’s horse — is a movie with very rigidly prescribed and not particularly ambitious melodramatic inclinations. Screenwriters Richard Curtis and Lee Hall, working from Michael Morpurgo’s novel, get plenty right in the period detail, but never find a way to make a dramatic throughline really stick, and when the film actually goes off to war its grip loosens considerably. For the full, original review, from Screen International, click here. (DreamWorks, PG-13, 146 minutes)