The filmmaker's rich, husky-voiced narration manages to shape this collection of half-formed ideas and observations into a tightly packed little roll-up that's worth taking a puff on.
Comment
10/06/04
Bright Leaves (2004)
86
%
Tomatometer
How does the Tomatometer work 
Reviews Counted:57
Fresh:49
Rotten:8
Average Rating:7.4/10
Consensus: A rich, eccentric documentary about both filmmaking and the tobacco industry.
Runtime: 1 hr 47 mins
Genre: Education/General Interest
Synopsis: Ross McElwee directs this autobiographical documentary about his family's roots in the tobacco business in North Carolina. Taking a sabbatical from his home in Boston, he offers a culturally... [More]
Director: Ross McElwee
Reviews for Bright Leaves
Top CriticClick to read the article
02/09/06
Top CriticMcElwee forsakes the muckraking strategies of Michael Moore and Nick Broomfield in favour of a gentler, more ruminative style, resulting in a work that is remarkable for its warmth and wisdom.
10/11/03
Opens tediously slow, but grows on you, reels you in, perhaps like smoking itself. "trance-like, seemingly suspending time." Then, like smoking, finds difficulty quitting.
10/25/04
An utterly mundane miracle, a sampling of gentle insight and poetic retrospection quietly at odds with the exploitative culture around it.
08/24/04
A weightless film. Worse still, McElwee's languid tone makes his journey lack conviction.
11/05/04
Eventually, we realize that moviemaking has replaced nicotine as McElwee's addiction: Every so often, he has to step outside for a fix.
10/29/04
Bright Leaves is a smart, ethically rich, innovative and well-done documentary about the tobacco industry. family legacies and the pleasures of filmmaking.
10/12/03
A meandering riff on the dangerous allure of smoking, and more interestingly a meditation on the way motion pictures can preserve our life experiences-- but only to a point.
03/05/05
Where most documentaries offer us facts to hold on to, [McElwee's] are obsessed with the mystery of things we don't know and never will.
09/24/04
detours never seem self-indulgent, just the flights of fancy of a creative intellect
11/21/04
Bright Leaves mixes social conscience with personal journey in an even balance.
12/01/04
McElwee's autobiographical films ... are leisurely jaunts with a gentle humor that never mocks his subjects.
12/02/04
Ross McElwee ambles through one tobacco-related subject after another... it's too scattered all over the place to be truly informative.
04/29/05
It's a meandering visit by a curious man with a quiet sense of humor.
12/03/04
Top CriticThis rich, complex and surprisingly entertaining film also becomes a meditation on filmmaking and the parallels McElwee finds between cinema and, of all things, smoking.
08/27/04
A transcendent documentary that swirls in a temporarily timeless haze of themes: imagined pasts, shadowy legacies, cinematic heirlooms and the bittersweet landscape of memory.
11/26/04
A witty and sometimes touching tale of film, family and lung cancer.
10/21/04
Ostensibly about an epic betrayal, Bright Leaves spirals beautifully in a hundred different directions.
10/10/03
blends nostalgia, economics, and personal reactions to new information at a perfect pitch that allows for laughter and deeply felt affection
10/14/03
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