"Forty Shades" -- more reviews

The Village Voice, with a largely favorable review and a lamebrain headline ("... a stunning grand ole soap opry"), says, among other things:

A rare serving of adept regional indie cinema, Ira Sachs's Forty Shades of Blue uses its Memphis milieu as setting and as character—the film is waist-deep in country-blues insouciance humming with nostalgia for itself and disdain for early-millennium consumer homogenization. But Sachs, a talented realist whose previous feature was The Delta (1997), doesn't cartoon it up; the local fauna lives its own life at the film's edges.

Cinematical gives a lengthy description and then concludes:

The audience is left stranded over and over again, struggling to assign meaning to scenes that are clearly supposed to be deeply affecting but in reality offer nothing but hollow images.