Critic consensus:In Stories We Tell, Sarah Polley plays with the documentary format to explore the nature of memory and storytelling, crafting a thoughtful, compelling narrative that unfolds like a mystery.

Numbered reviews:1. Apart from minor details and interpretations, the witnesses don't often disagree about what happened. What does deepen as the people onscreen go on talking is our relationship with them: The more they reveal themselves, the more attractive they become.
2. One of the year's best films: funny, moving, thought-provoking - and so personal that it strikes universal chords.
3. Don't let anyone spoil the surprises that unravel in this movie as Polley has her brilliant way with the elusiveness of truth.
4. [an] engrossing documentary exploration of how the bricks of memory are untidily piled together to create messy and incomplete personal stories, and out of those stories comes a life.
5. The film is a mystery uncovered like a detective story, wrapped in a love letter.
6. I want to start a campaign right now to get Sarah Polley the first screenwriting nomination for a documentary.
7. This is simply a gorgeously realised and warmly compiled family album, which lingers with us not because its subjects are so unusual and alien, but because they feel so close to home. What a success.
8. Sarah Polley's personal "documentary" suffers from one additional emotional beat too many. Otherwise, it's mesmerizing.
9. An absorbing exercise not only in documentary excavation but in narrative construction.
10. Sarah Polley's exploration of her tangled family history is a complex and thoroughly fascinating inquiry into the nature of truth and memory -- and, inevitably, into Polley herself.


Critic consensus:As gripping as it is inspiring, Last Days in Vietnam offers a surprisingly fresh -- and heart-wrenching -- perspective on the end of the Vietnam War.

Numbered reviews:1. Anyone who thinks history is dry stuff should see "Last Days in Vietnam" - and heed its lessons.
2. "Last Days in Vietnam" will be broadcast in April on the long-running PBS series "American Experience." But it holds up on a bigger screen and deserves a large audience earlier than that.
3. A film of great sadness, but also a galvanizing depiction of heroism.
4. This is a solidly involving documentary that reminds us of one of the worst parts of our history, and of some of the best people who were a part of it.
5. It's a work that informs, inspires and angers, as it recounts the final hours of a war that Kennedy's uncle John began with the best of intentions, and President Gerald Ford ended with the worst of betrayals.
6. There is enough triumph and tragedy and heroism and heartbreak here to fill three or four features, but director Rory Kennedy smartly packs everything into just 98 minutes, and so captures the rushed, chaotic, just-keep-going feel of those dark days.
7. Sometimes the stories we think we know, the stories where we don't want to hear another word, turn out to be the most involving of all, the ones we in fact know the least about. So it is with "Last Days in Vietnam."
8. Deja vu, all over again, and riveting.
9. A painstaking look at the heart-breaking situation that unfolded as the Vietnam War came to an abrupt end.
10. As a portrait of America in a moment both of idealism and betrayal, the movie is heartbreaking as well as inspiring.


Critic consensus:Birth, death, and transformation are examined in Le Quattro Volte, a profound and often funny mediation on the cycles of life on earth.

Numbered reviews:
1. Frammartino uses long, carefully observed takes to capture the natural world and the way the same patterns keep erupting from beneath humanity's attempts to impose order upon it.
2. Thanks to the director's inquisitive camera and the sheer beauty of the setting, I fell under [the film's] spell early on and remained captivated throughout.
3. (Frammartino's) deceptively simple film is, in fact, brimming with universal wisdom and life-affirming sincerity.
4. This is a prime Festival Film, equally beautiful and turgid; Frammartino has lots of promise, but might be well served by thinking of something smaller than all of Nature.
5. It is a devastating, profound and at times surreal work of art.
6. Giving all new meaning to the title "Men Who Stare at Goats" is "Le Quattro Volte," an example of contemporary Italian neo-realism about taking a long, hard look at our horned and hoofed friends.
7. Frammartino's idyll of mystic metempsychosis batters down the boundary fence between tradition and modernity, pagan and Christian, documentary and fiction.
8. If you can separate yourself from the buzz of higher-pitch cinema, the film's beauty, wit and charm come as a breath of fresh air.
9. A beautiful but slow moving celebration of life, stunningly photographed.
10. If you succumb to these charms, I guarantee walking out of the theatre into the noisy city will be a jarring sensory overload experience.