Cinema Verite

Not a dull or wasted moment, and Lane may have just turned in the one of the best performances of her career.

In Cinema Verite, 90 minutes might not do justice to the historical impact of An American Family. But it makes you wish there were 90 more minutes to the story, which is saying something.

They [the Loud family] are to the contrary enlarged, explained, their family loyalty honored, in a film that ends up packing an emotional punch that's as surprising as it is eloquent.

This wonderful docudrama about its [An American Family] making, chronicles a loss of media innocence. [22/29 Apr 2011, p.92]

At the end, Cinema Verite shows how the Louds dealt with the notoriety after the series aired, and where they are now. Cinema Verite blurs the lines even more - but there's a perverse logic to that.

Additional time would have made Verite more convincing. At 90 minutes, it runs short, especially as the family copes with its newfound notoriety

Cinema Verite's strength is in dramatizing the off-camera seductions and betrayals that led to the Louds being vilified in many quarters before the entire family went on The Dick Cavett Show to both tell their side of the story and confront filmmaker Craig Gilbert.

Cinema Verite is short (not even 90 minutes), smooth and brisk.

HBO's drama Cinema Verite is a searing and irresistible look at the making of An American Family and an incisive dissection of the mendacity of what we so absurdly call reality TV.

A finely constructed docu-dramatic piece, Cinema Verite folds together the stories of the Louds of Santa Barbara and the PBS filmmakers who took over their home, and it adds in both real and expertly re-created footage from the 12 episodes of "An American Family."

Cinema Verite works in the same off-kilter way that HBO's "Grey Gardens" worked.

HBO's punchy, pungent but ultimately facile Cinema Verite dramatizes the making of 1973's revolutionary PBS (!) docu-series An American Family, a precursor to today's exhibitionistic "reality" freak shows.

Looks notwithstanding, these TV and movie vets fashion thoughtful, flesh-and-blood individuals whose efforts at achieving happiness seem locked in a perpetual reach for self-awareness. Too bad they're nearly wasted in this hour and a half of paint-by-colors television.

Cinema Verite is not a bad movie at all but its failing is an ironic one: it smooths out the messiness and non sequiturs of real life to fit its story into a neat feature-film arc.

An intriguing but often clumsy new movie about the making of the TV show.

It plays, for better and worse, like a slightly elevated version of one of those issue-of-the-week telefilms of the old school, with their teen traumas and kitchen-sink melodramas.

As the Loud family fractures and then reunites to fight back against their critics, Cinema Verite settles into melodrama that Lane's solid performance can only partly hold together.

Cinema Verite is a clever, beautifully made but somehow underwhelming re-enactment of the breakup of the Loud marriage, on camera and off.

As an attempt to tell the truth about an attempt to tell the truth about the state of domestic relations in a time of changing values, Cinema Verite fails--it cannot help but fail--as anything but a platform for some interesting performances and a few explicitly, loudly and briefly argued ideas about where one should draw the line when you point a camera into innocent people's lives.

Cinema Verite dramatizes the making of "An American Family," but it dwells too long on the setup and doesn't spend nearly enough time on the public response to the program and the impact that reaction (much of it negative) had on the Louds.

Cinema Verite is smart and often moving, but unsatisfying overall.