Unfolds like an epistolary psychological mystery. Little about or in this movie is as simple as it seems.

| May 10, 2007

| Original Score: 4/6 | Feb 3, 2007

It gradually turns into a vivid demonstration that truth can be stronger than fiction, and that compromise is necessary in any lasting relationship.

Full Review | Original Score: 3.5/4 | Jan 12, 2007

The film grows in power as it goes, finding ever more universal levels of feeling.

| Original Score: 3.5/4 | Nov 24, 2006

Through haunting home movies, Mina's diaries and interviews with Mike, a raw, riveting portrait emerges of what a child sees in his parents' relationship and what lies beneath.

Full Review | Original Score: 3.5/4 | Nov 13, 2006

A resounding success because it touches on things every child has wondered about on the road to adulthood.

| Original Score: 4/4 | Nov 3, 2006

Ultimately, the film reveals more about Block than about his private, remote mother and father.

Full Review | Original Score: C- | Nov 3, 2006

The film has a compelling way about it. All five of the immediate Block family members emerge in full and affecting portraits.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/4 | Nov 2, 2006

A warm and honest portrait of a marriage at its most mysterious, and ordinary.

| Original Score: A- | Oct 25, 2006

The intimate history of Doug Block's parents becomes fodder for a broader look at family secrets in this complex documentary.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/4 | Oct 20, 2006

What makes 51 Birch Street a moving revelation rather than a therapeutic exercise is Block's commitment to understanding his parents, Mike and Mina, on their own terms, regardless of what it does to his image of them.

| Original Score: 3.5/5 | Oct 19, 2006

It's a loving, painful map of the gulf between thought and word, between word and deed, that props up good marriages, and sends bad ones to hell.

Full Review | Oct 19, 2006

Doug Block's very moving, honest and even suspenseful autopsy of his parents' marriage is the kind of film audiences leave the theater talking about, and which keeps them talking days later.

Full Review | Original Score: 3.5/4 | Oct 18, 2006

In 51 Birch Street, a moving and fascinating documentary, Doug Block investigates the lingering, buried frustration in his parents otherwise ordinary lives.

Full Review | Original Score: 4.5/5 | Oct 18, 2006

The resulting documentary begins shakily, with a naked self-consciousness that can be off-putting, but quickly develops into an absorbing and ever deepening drama.

| Oct 18, 2006

The filmmaker's intrusion into the private world of his parents' marriage gets at truths about a generation of men and women.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Oct 13, 2006

A tonal triumph of true-life storytelling told with equal measures of tension and redemption.

| Mar 10, 2006

In some ways, an antidote to the sugarcoated myths and lies the movies have taught us about love and marriage.

| Original Score: 4/4 | Oct 7, 2005