Sundance. Stranded.

"The saga of the Uruguayan rubgy team that resorted to cannibalism after crashing in the Andes in '72 has been told maybe too many times... but it's no exaggeration to say that Gonzalo Arijon's [Stranded: I've come from a plane that crashed on the mountains] is the story's definitive version," writes Noel Murray at the AV Club.

"Stranded is neither sensational nor evasive about what the survivors did, and what they had to do as their meager food supplies ran out and they had to turn to the bodies of their fallen friends," writes James Rocchi at Cinematical. "In the current-day interviews, the survivors are careful and sensitive and judicious in discussing their experiences; at the same time, you can feel the sting of cold logic when one survivor explains how after word came that the air search was called off, 'We, the Strauch cousins, prepared the meat...'"

"There's nothing about this story or the way it's told that would make any viewer feel anything but sympathy for their ordeal, and certainly, this is a case where asking us to take a second to contemplate the image of someone saying 'I didn't want to do it, but I had to' has far greater impact than the words themselves," writes Karina Longworth at the SpoutBlog. "Those shots, of an eye twitching almost imperceptibly while a survivor recovers from an admission, tell us everything we need to know."

Earlier: David D'Arcy.

Posted by dwhudson at January 20, 2008 2:14 PM