Metacritic reviews

When Jackson’s All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt forms its full portrait, pulling together these seemingly disparate images for seismic import, the film is a treasure of community, a bold depiction of Black life, and a sumptuously crafted piece of personal storytelling that rises above tropes and cliches toward a piercing intimacy.

Jackson is the epitome of a filmmaker whose gaze truly makes everything seem previously unseen. By walking alongside her characters, indeed the salt of the earth, we experience what was always there with brand new wisdom.

For relying on the barest narrative threads, watching All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt is more an experience of transformative renewal than gleaning specific details of Mack’s story.

In poetic fashion, All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt asks for interpretation, making ordinary explanations unnecessary.

The film puts people and their surroundings, the moments of grand drama and the moments of contemplative solitude, in a state of spiritual equality.

If you assent, All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt is endlessly rewarding, a tactile sense-memory tapestry of all the things that matter.

If “All Dirt Roads” perhaps does not connect quite as powerfully as it could on a narrative level, it marks the arrival of an arresting new talent in Raven Jackson, at the very least as the creator of the kind of cinema you do not watch as much as touch and smell and taste.

All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt’s non-linear approach requires patience and its character development is a bit thin, but the film is stunning, thought-provoking, and poignant, with each frame lovingly executed.

The vague but vividly rendered All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt runs a little drier every time writer-director Raven Jackson loops back to squeeze another drop of meaning from the textures and traditions that connect a Black Mississippi woman to the place where she was born (and vice-versa).

It may not always land and gets lost in itself on the way there, but Jackson has crafted a beautiful experiment indicative of ambitious vision, one whose magic outweighs its weaknesses.