"Obit" manages to be both about a specific type of journalism and the larger world it reflects while dropping in all manner of colorful lives and circumstances.

| Original Score: B+ | Jun 23, 2017

The real subject here is storytelling, the creation of a stylish, authoritative, highly personal record of "how the world got to be the way it is." One more thing to miss about newspapers when they go.

| Original Score: 3/5 | May 18, 2017

As someone who takes great pleasure in both reading and writing valedictions to the recently deceased, I can personally attest that the movie's dead on.

| Original Score: 3.5/4 | May 18, 2017

It is fascinating to watch the writers in "Obit" strive to do right by their subjects, warts and all.

| Original Score: 3.5/4 | May 11, 2017

These folks are neither dour nor sappy; they are just talented journalists who want to do right by the people who left their mark on the world.

| Original Score: 3/4 | May 10, 2017

Vanessa Gould's brisk, affectionate documentary Obit suggests that obituary writing as practiced by the ace team at The New York Times could be the most imaginative and organic form of journalism in contemporary newspapers.

| May 5, 2017

A fascinating look at the way in which these memorials function as not only tributes to fascinating, influential, idiosyncratic lives, but also as crucial records about our society and culture.

| May 4, 2017

The people brought to life here, using a combination of the written obituary and news clips, are a varied and fascinating bunch.

| May 4, 2017

Writing an evocative, compact, accurate obituary is an art, and Vanessa Gould's joyous documentary Obit takes us on a tour of the joint where some of the best are written ...

| May 4, 2017

It is abundantly clear that Obit was made by someone who, to paraphrase featured obituarist Bruce Weber, has encountered death before and knows how to approach the subject with compassion.

| Apr 27, 2017

Readers of the New York Times are bound to enjoy an inside look at one of the paper's most dependably enthralling sections.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Apr 26, 2017

Do something memorable, and do it fast. Obit implies that the obituary page, like everything else, is fast becoming a dying art.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Apr 26, 2017

Entertaining if a bit conventional in its anecdotal structure and slightly cutesy tone, these 95 minutes should appeal to the same public that happily spends half the day reading the Sunday Times ...

| Apr 26, 2017

One comes away from "Obit" grateful that the paper has at its disposal a team of humane, gifted people who make commemorating the dead a lively, lasting art.

| Apr 25, 2017

Obit rarely strays from the anodyne tone of the advertorial.

| Apr 24, 2017

The film ascribes to a conventionally contrapuntal take on the lives of those who spend all day surrounded by death.

| Original Score: 2/4 | Apr 23, 2017

OBIT, the new documentary from director Vanessa Gould, lingers at the newspaper's death-desk to think through the meaning of remembrance, and to show the workday of these uncommon journalists.

| Apr 17, 2017

Gould secures plenty of nuts-and-bolts detail about the reporting and writing process, which can range from novelistic use of detail to the prosaic but no less critical matter of confirming the death itself.

| Mar 31, 2017

Documentarian Vanessa Gould leads her viewer by the hand through the day in a life of the darling weirdos at The New York Times obituary desk.

| Original Score: 3.5/4 | Mar 31, 2017

Obit is a fascinating, if slightly too long, look at newspaper journalism in general and obituaries in particular.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Mar 30, 2017