Critics reviews

There is a poetry to these films, and they provide a sense of sustenance and succor in increasingly uncertain times.

A fleeting object that resists one preferable meaning or interpretation. Appreciated from a perspective of sixteen years, it now seems to fit perfectly in the moment of its making, but still feels as fresh, original, and full of optimism as it used to be when it was first released.

Ironically, all the diversions make a better bid for gleaning in the modern age than most documentaries that make this demand their raison d'être, as the film calmly suggests that gleaning is the default state of human life, which makes any attempt to impede it an unnatural disruption.

Varda's magnanimous, inquisitive road documentary is arguably the best work of any kind to begin by citing a dictionary definition... The Gleaners and I is drawn to the forgotten and the left behind. But more than anything, Varda is passionate about life's continual discovery and perseverance, the serendipitous, extra things we find and are happy to keep uncovering.

In The Gleaners and I (2000), a marvelous nonfiction collage of those who scavenge and salvage in France, the "I" of the title is a vital, inquisitive force.

Varda uses GLEANERS to consider her own aging, revolving technology, the ethics of waste, and, probably most poignantly for viewers in 2013, the sliding economic realities that brought gleaning back as a common practice.

I think that part of what critics and audiences respond to in Varda's work is her utter lack of pretension and her capacity to tackle several interlocking subjects, personal as well as general, without any sense of strain... However, this pleasurable sense of drift may also be what ultimately makes this film fall just short of being a masterpiece — because it refuses to develop or build on its insights.