51 Birch Street.

AO Scott calls 51 Birch Street "one of the most moving and fascinating documentaries I've seen this year." Doug Block "confirms what the best novelists know: that marriage, among the most common of human arrangements, is also among the most complex and mysterious.... At the same time, a window opens onto the history of the postwar American middle class, as its placid suburban idyll is buffeted by the cultural upheavals of the 60s and 70s: feminism, psychotherapy, drugs, the sexual revolution.... Mr Block has put his parents' life, and his own, into this film with such warmth and candor that it may take more than one viewing to recognize it as a work of art."

Salon's Andrew O'Hehir: "I found myself reflecting on the peculiar, half-hidden stories of pain and betrayal in my own family, and you will too. Although there's a tremendous current of sadness and loss in Block's film, which extends, perhaps unconsciously, to the way he presents himself, learning the truth (or as much of it as he can) turns out, at least in this case, to be both liberating and redemptive."

Michael Tully finds it "filmmaking at its most enthralling and provocative, non-fiction or otherwise."

Updated through 10/21.

Alison Willmore at the IFC Blog: "As the film progresses through a series of increasingly heart-rending and crushingly candid interviews with the older Mr Block, it draws out a compassionate portrait of the man that seems unexpected even to the filmmaker, who in the end finds the camera turned, touchingly, on himself."

"On one level, 51 Birch Street is a well-made, if somewhat conventional, autobiographical documentary," writes Paul Harrill. "But the movie is about looking beneath the surface, and on that meaningful score 51 Birch Street succeeds."

Earlier: My own first take and interviews with Doug: John Anderson in the NYT, Anne S Lewis in the Austin Chronicle and indieWIRE.

Update, 10/21: Gary Dretzka at Movie City News: "Some critics have compared 51 Birch Street to Capturing the Friedmans, but that's a stretch. Mostly, they share a style that leans heavily on family photo albums and home movies; a Long Island setting; and similar ethnic backgrounds for the key players. The Blocks' secrets are unnerving, but no where as profoundly creepy as those of the Friedmans. Both are, however, compelling in their patient explorations of family dynamics."

Posted by dwhudson at October 19, 2006 4:26 PM