Such a conceit could easily turn gimmicky, but in the case of The Arbor, the chasm between performance, recital, and lived reality (retold), can fit a whole world.

| Original Score: 79/100 | Nov 24, 2023

Though The Arbor is hard to watch, it's even harder to define, but it's clear that this is Andrea, this is England, and this is extraordinary.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Mar 11, 2016

Ms. Barnard illustrates in heartbreaking fashion how the cycle of familial neglect, low self-esteem and self destruction completely ruined lives that were once so full of promise.

| Oct 7, 2015

What emerges is a curious mix of avant-garde technique and social-realist case study, equally indebted to Barnard's art-world-video background and Dunbar's own close-to-the-bone writing.

| Jun 28, 2013

This is a fiercely intellectual piece of cinema that still manages to grab your heart and punch you in the gut.

| Original Score: 5/5 | Feb 4, 2013

...riveting stuff, all the more so since it's "real."

| Original Score: 3.5/4 | Jan 31, 2012

Documentaries often toy with the conventions of non-fiction storytelling to the detriment of their content, but Clio Barnard's innovative The Arbor provides a welcome exception to the norm.

| Original Score: A | Jan 5, 2012

Numerous celluloid experiments have fudged reality and fiction lately, but few are as formally inventive or socially revelatory as The Arbor.

| Jan 5, 2012

For the morbidly curious, it's mesmerizing. But it's also a singularly watchable story for the strange, and strangely fitting, way in which it's told.

| Original Score: 2.5/4 | Aug 5, 2011

British Poor Adrift in Turbulent 'Arbor'

| Original Score: B minus | Jul 22, 2011

[An] exquisitely crafted docudrama.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/4 | Jul 21, 2011

The only weakness in this captivating film: too much screen time given to the trials and travails of Dunbar's half-Pakistani daughter, Lorraine, a heroin addict still suffering from the disinterest of her late mum.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Jul 19, 2011

The format suggests such films as "Synechdoche, New York" or "American Splendor," but Barnard has gone beyond them, also instilling a theatrical element befitting her subject.

| Original Score: A- | Jul 12, 2011

It's an even handed and responsible profile that recognises the playwright's important contribution to British theatre without turning away from the vulnerable and flawed human being that she was.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Jul 6, 2011

The film's strange way of meandering off its original topic is never resolved, but even with its deficiencies The Arbor is always intelligent cinema.

| Original Score: 7.4/10 | May 5, 2011

The peanut gallery might say Clio Barnard's genre-bending The Arbor is a mixed-up moving target, but it's strikingly honed in on its subject: the lauded writer and loathed matriarch Andrea Dunbar.

| Original Score: 4/5 | May 3, 2011

Barnard's boldest move is to unveil the irresponsible chaos of the playwright's private life, and to make us wonder if the art was worth the suffering, after all.

| May 2, 2011

Intense, startlingly creative. . .bio-doc. . .and searing portrait of destructive inheritance of addiction and domestic violence within . . .one family. . .and neighborhood.

| Original Score: 10/10 | May 1, 2011

From the sublimely ridiculous to the simply sublime, The Arbor exists at the intersection of life and art, reality and performance, documentary and fiction, and it explores that terrain in a way no other movie quite has before.

| Apr 29, 2011

An epic piece of theatrical detachment

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Apr 28, 2011