Flying: Confessions of a Free Woman.

"By turns playful, sexy, tragic and contemplative, Flying: Confessions of a Free Woman is an addictive soap about sexuality and sisterhood," writes Jeannette Catsoulis in the New York Times.

"[W]hat truly redeems this self-indulgence is that [director Jennifer] Fox uses her overwrought, Nora Ephron-ish personal crises as a jumping-off point to explore the emotional lives of dozens of women around the world—women who tend to be more interesting and engaging than Fox herself (and certainly have more common sense)," writes Julia Wallace in the Voice. "In the end, Flying is a gentle monstrosity, swollen and silly, but shot through with some wonderful stories. And after six hours, I know this for sure: Fox is far more competent behind the camera than in front of it, better at observing life than living it."

"Fox knows she is risking ridicule with this material, and there were moments over the six-hour stretch of Flying when I found her insufferable and whiny," writes Andrew O'Hehir in Salon. "Furthermore, I'm suspicious of her essentialist notion that men and women have fundamentally different modes of communication, and that the extended, talky, personal-meets-political mode of Flying is inherently female.... At some point, I finally swooned and surrendered before the raw power of Fox's reiterative method. (She has boiled down these six hours from something like 1,600 hours of raw video.) While I still found the director's on-screen persona irritating, she had become an irritating person I cared about."

"Depending on your tolerance for this sort of thing, and how willing you are to invest in the foibles of someone who calls her boyfriends 'lovers' and has been in therapy for 20 years but only recently decided it was 'time to face my mother,' Flying can be infuriating, insipid, embarrassing, compelling and sometimes all of those things, all at once," writes Michelle Orange for the Reeler. "It is also rather consistently a fascinating look at the lives and attitudes of women around the world - many of them women whose suffering and subjugation are proscribed from birth - and the ways that Fox's extreme privilege has not deterred her from finding a set of obstacles to stand in the way of her own 'happiness.'"

And IndieWIRE interviews Fox.

Cathleen Rountree interviews Fox, too.

Posted by dwhudson at July 5, 2007 7:19 AM