This impressive first feature documentary from photographer Pete Muller has much to say about fractured modern masculinity, without explicitly saying much at all.
A compelling, tender human study, and a testament to individual strength and community spirit.
Bucks Harbor 2026
The coast is craggy and rugged in Bucks Harbor, and so are many of the faces — lined and hard-lived and visibly storied, in a way that plainly speaks to the original photographer in director Pete Muller, here making a fluent and expansive transition to documentary filmmaking. His camera loves the weary, callused men of the small Maine fishing community that lends the film its title, though his heart evidently does too: As it takes in the rhythms and routines of lives buffeted by time, tide and weather, Bucks Harbor never treats its subjects as rural ethnographic case studies, but as full-bodied characters with complicated tales of their own to tell.
“If Bangor, Maine is the asshole of the world, we’re 200 miles up it,” says stoic lobster trawler Mike of the remote waterfront he calls home, not far from the Canadian border. His tone isn’t bitter, and indeed, a mood of jaded contentment prevails in Bucks Harbor: It may be sleepy and dilapidated, but it has its own shabby comforts.
– Guy Lodge, Variety