What I learned from Monrovia, Indiana is that I - personally - am bored by mattress shopping, City Council arguments over fire hydrants, and high school band concerts I am not obligated by shared DNA to attend.

| Original Score: 2.5/5 | Nov 15, 2018

Like all of Wiseman's films, "Monrovia, Indiana" possesses almost meditative power.

| Original Score: 3.5/4 | Nov 8, 2018

As usual, Wiseman's scenes extend for long stretches, which can be an acquired taste for some viewers. Yet this time around, he ends his film with one of the most shattering sequences of his career...

| Original Score: 3/4 | Nov 7, 2018

Given enough time, Wiseman would conceivably want to make documentaries about everything. That's amazing. What's even more amazing: If anyone could actually do it, it's Wiseman

| Original Score: 2.5/4 | Nov 6, 2018

There's a natural drama in life, an organic meditation in the preparation of ground beef or the cutting of pork chops, the sharpening of a knife. They're the tiny bits of life that Wiseman's film clings to.

| Original Score: 4/4 | Nov 2, 2018

The result is surprisingly companionable and enjoyable, an unhurried look at a location that is in no kind of rush, a place that is concerned most of all with preserving the way it's always been.

| Nov 1, 2018

These are lovely images, but they leave a disturbing aftertaste. The final take away from Monrovia, Indiana, is that the town is a great place to be an inanimate object.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Nov 1, 2018

Legendary documentarian Frederick Wiseman turns his camera on a pro-gun, pro-God Midwestern town and gives us a landmark view of what it looks like to live in Trump's America.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Oct 26, 2018

Wiseman's portrait reveals emptiness that's subtle and unforced but becomes devastating.

| Original Score: 4/4 | Oct 26, 2018

A calmly analytical film in which-as ever in Wiseman's work-extended discussions and public debates are developed with an absorbing dramatic power.

| Oct 26, 2018

The pace is slow over the course of 143 minutes, sometimes maddeningly so, even for a Wiseman documentary, but the film rewards patience.

| Oct 26, 2018

Wiseman once again reveals his enduring inquisitiveness without being an inquisitor. There's no easily discernible - or dismissible - agenda or narrative, just curiosity, observation and discovery.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Oct 26, 2018

The unavoidable political implications of "Monrovia, Indiana" give its observations an undeniable urgency.

| Oct 25, 2018

Wiseman has made the same documentary that he always makes (in his geographical mode), employing the same methods. Whether those methods serve him or his viewers well, in this case, is the crucial question.

| Original Score: C+ | Oct 23, 2018

Few filmmakers can turn a mundane town council meeting about a library bench into a meditation on patriotism and civic responsibility the way Wiseman can.

| Original Score: B+ | Oct 23, 2018

As always with Frederick Wiseman, it's the quotidian gestures that haunt one in Monrovia, Indiana.

| Original Score: 4/4 | Sep 8, 2018

Regardless of the movie's elusive agenda, Monrovia, Indiana is an immersive wonder, thanks to Wiseman's masterful ability to assemble images that lead from one painterly visual to the next.

| Original Score: B+ | Sep 6, 2018

Pleasurably low-key if not among his most invaluable recent works, Frederick Wiseman's latest American opus takes a long, slow look at a rural red-state town.

| Sep 5, 2018

Wiseman in a minor key.

| Sep 4, 2018