Documentary filmmaker Frederick Wiseman, now in his sixth decade of filmmaking, always gets good reviews but his latest, a film that immerses its audience in London’s National Gallery and we open November 21 at the Royal Theater, is garnering raves. From Manohla Dargis at the New York Times (“Like most of Mr. Wiseman’s work, the movie is at once specific and general, fascinating in its pinpoint detail and transporting in its cosmic reach.”), to Tim Grierson at Paste Magazine (“Nourishing and enthralling, NATIONAL GALLERY is the work of a man still invested in the arts, in the world and in people.”), to David Denby at the New Yorker (“Holds the movie viewer in a state of intense and pleasurable concentration”), even the toughest of critics are telling us that Mr. Wiseman’s latest is not to be missed.

The Daily Beast just published a good piece about the film by Tim Teeman:

Inside The Secret World of London’s National Gallery

“Frederick Wiseman’s entrancing ‘National Gallery’ roves freely around the great British institution, turning its lens on both visitors and the people that run the show.

“Observing the observers observing: there is a brave and remarkable poise to Frederick Wiseman’s National Gallery, a three-hour documentary presently showing at New York’s Film Forum—before a wider release on November 21—which takes the viewer on an ambling, extremely nosey tour of London’s National Gallery, focusing on both visitors and the staff who run it.”The most wonderful thing about it, the moments Wiseman keeps studding the documentary with, are images of people looking at pictures on walls. This, unexpectedly, is fascinating: you watch as they/we crinkle our faces up, really looking at brushwork; or walk in front of a canvas, and then walk back; or quickly move on, and then return; or sit, rapt in contemplation; or look confused or elated, tired or utterly immersed.”Given the amount of explosions and dumb sex comedies on our cinema screens, how can you not applaud a three-hour film that explores our reception and appreciation of art, and how that art is curated, lit, and displayed for us?“National Gallery is Wiseman’s latest, burrowing journey into an institution in a film-making career that has spanned almost sixty years, including movies like High School (1968), Missile (1987), Central Park (1989), and La Danse (2009), about the Paris Opera Ballet. Wiseman goes to places or into the reality of a lived experience—a hospital, army basic training, or a police precinct—and quietly, without his presence overtly felt, interrogates and observes it.”There is something imperiously subversive about National Gallery. Unlike the loud, pantomimishly structured documentaries of today, the parade of freaks and freakish, combusting and self-combusting, and warzones in gruesome close-up, there is no dramatic arc, no salivating over conflicts, no set-ups. There are no captions explaining who anybody is, no explanations of what they are doing. There is no spoon-feeding of anything.”

Read the complete Daily Beast piece by clicking here.

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