Few directors capture the Midwest as beautifully and poignantly as Jeff Nichols, and almost none of them do so with the same subtlety. His films are about a great many things - the bonds of family, the difficulty of surviving on the lowest rungs of the economic ladder, what it means to be a man - but he weaves these themes into stories that are so compelling that they never feel laboured or complex for complexity's sake. His films are densely layered, yet they also feel guileless. This is especially true of his third film, Mud, which might seem minor in comparison to the apocalyptic menace of his previous film, Take Shelter, but is no less powerful for its smaller scale.