Eleştirmen yorumları

Moselle's Sundance-winning pop doc about a group of forcibly locked away siblings is at turns thrilling, ethically complex, frustratingly naïve, distinctively moving and knowingly surreal.

The film remains a testament to movie love, and how acculturated, against all odds, you could become on a steady diet of Hollywood product. But in contrast to, say, Makhmalbaf's semi-fictional sleight of hand, Moselle largely misses the opportunity to see the Angulos' strange life through the looking glass of movies – to view their chilling society-deprivation experiment, and her exploration of it, as another form of cinema.

You might expect The Wolfpack to resemble an anthropological exercise, a clinical study designed to stimulate the great nature versus nurture debate. Yet perhaps the most unusual thing about the Angulo brothers is how normal they appear. Far from being a dysfunctional, troublingly maladjusted bunch, Bhagavan, Govinda, Jagadisa, Krsna, Mukunda and Narayana are bright, affable and, most surprisingly, comfortable in front of the camera.

Watching the film, at first, is a deeply uncomfortable experience... But Moselle's affection for these tough-talking whelps brings you gradually, optimistically, inside their world of gritty make-believe, and you root for them to take their lives conclusively into their own hands.

The standout, from an audience point of view, was The Wolfpack... It's a compelling record of a family in transition that came about through happenstance.

The Wolfpack frustrates the viewer's expectations as well. I certainly would have liked to see more of the Angulo family's homemade films and Moselle leaves unexplored numerous questions regarding Oscar's philosophy and his manner of enforcing discipline... These questions [about how the Angulos lived] are subsumed in The Wolfpack's stunning testament to the redemptive power of cinema.

Moselle pieces together a story that is at once shocking, moving, and an ode to the miraculous power of cinema... The Wolfpack could have only been crafted by a documentarian who had the complete trust of her subjects. It is a thrilling testament to the power of cinema delivered both in form (as a piece of great cinema) and content (the story of lives saved by the movies).

The Wolfpack is no great shakes as a doc, but it does package an irresistible product—and a rare one. True "outsider" art is a rarity in any age, but more so in the plugged-in present, when technology makes the idea of privately cultivating an idiosyncratic style very nearly obsolescent.

The relationship between documentarians and their subjects is often delicate, especially when it comes to private space, but The Wolfpack is perhaps too reluctant to pursue lines of inquiry; what starts as a nonfiction mood piece grows frustratingly opaque as the brothers begin to venture out into the real world, meet girls, and get jobs.

It's easy to imagine what an exploitative director, using artful editing and a sinister score, could have done to darken this material. At the same time, it's hard to imagine a more sensitive director for this story than Crystal Moselle, a 34-year-old who five years ago discovered the brothers soon after they began making unaccompanied excursions outside. Sometimes, all you need is a great subject to make a great documentary — or a willingness to chase after total strangers.

Their Reservoir Dogs—a multi-character story ideal for brothers—is a lovely homage, the "Stuck in the Middle With You" torture scene a standout. More poignant is their Nightmare on Elm Street/horror pastiche, which they stage—around an indoor bonfire—after apparently watching other costumed kids heading freely toward the West Village Halloween Parade.

The premise is potentially fascinating, though not for the reasons Moselle settles into, where the affability and behaviors of the sheltered innocents takes total precedence over any larger socio-economic concerns. By simply profiling the minors through interviews and quotidian detail, Moselle gains access to their psychology and reveals them to be competent and intelligent, though the filmmakers seem uncertain as to what these revelations mean.