On one level, the film is optimistic. Its protagonists may have problems but at least they haven’t given up on life.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Jan 16, 2025

What's more remarkable is that Oppenheim manages to give the happier scenes a sheen of grotesquerie without making them feel fake.

| Original Score: 7/10 | May 13, 2022

This documentary about America's largest retirement community is a much more wondrous film than the preconceptions elicited by that short description may suggest.

| Sep 24, 2021

[A] winning and funny documentary.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Aug 20, 2021

In Lance Oppenheim's playful and otherworldly documentary Some Kind of Heaven, we get a peculiar glimpse of the lives of people seeking to escape into something utopian and idealistic with varying results but a common sense of isolation.

| Jun 24, 2021

David Bolen's spectacular cinematography is the highlight of Some Kind of Heaven. [Full review in Spanish]

| Jun 9, 2021

The struggle to find fulfillment ... mirrors the fragile illusions, aspirations, and failures of everyday folk in their quest to secure that elusive American promise.

| Jun 5, 2021

A film about the meaning of our existence as individuals. A masterclass of how to film the human void. [Full review in Spanish]

| Original Score: 4/5 | Jun 2, 2021

Strange dystopia and really entertaining...

| May 24, 2021

"The film very skillfully gets to different perspectives of [The Villages], and it does so in a way that goes beyond just a simple presentation of those different perspectives."

| May 24, 2021

A fascinating portrait of life in America's largest retirement community.

| Original Score: 3.5/5 | May 20, 2021

It'd be easy to mistake the director's deadpan observation for mocking, but the space he holds for the darker aspects of his characters' individual stories helps to puncture any cultivated cutesyness.

| Original Score: 4/5 | May 17, 2021

Focused on four residents, it contents itself with telling poignant tales and letting Reggie, an ageing pothead, spring a few surprises.

| Original Score: 3/5 | May 17, 2021

It is a fascinatingly weird place and the film is worth seeing if only to get a sense of that.

| May 17, 2021

Oppenheim's subtle and enjoyable film allows us to deduce that, for some, their heaven is another person's idea of hell.

| Original Score: 4/5 | May 17, 2021

The film sits back at a (cowardly?) distance, until all we can do is admire those painterly images.

| Original Score: 2/5 | May 17, 2021

Ironically, the new release least likely to have you slumping on the sofa is Some Kind Of Heaven, a documentary about the world's largest retirement community.

| Original Score: 3/5 | May 17, 2021

The awkward silences, deadpan deliveries and semi-comedic tone are often reminiscent of Louis Theroux's early BBC work which gave us a previously unseen slice of middle America.

| Original Score: 5/5 | May 14, 2021

All human life is here, in other words, and Oppenheim's ability to capture just a sliver of it in such an artful and empathetic way reinforces how life never loses its ability to surprise, even as the end approaches.

| Original Score: 4/5 | May 14, 2021

The real-life characters are surprising and dealt with perfectly.

| Original Score: 5/5 | May 14, 2021