"The incandescent Ruby (which won the grand prize in the 1993 Sundance Film Festival) (is) a work of regional realism. Ruby is as much about the landscape of Panama City, Florida, as it is about its twenty-year-old hero (played by Ashley Judd)....At the opening of the film, Ruby Lee Gissing hightails it out of Tennessee....She heads for a dream of paradise and winds up living in a cheap motel on the gulf and working in a souvenir shop that caters to college students on spring break. What Ruby is really looking for-and finds-is herself. 'It's the desire, come hell or high water, to act in a way that life will have been worth it. It's about trying to survive with your soul intact,' says Nuñez. (Ruby is) extraordinarily specific in its depiction of female subjectivity (the trouble women have in locating and following their own desire, in seeing through their own eyes)..."-Amy Taubin, Village Voice