Critic Reviews

Block's hypnotic documentary, among the finest of the year.

51 Birch Street, like the best of the recent wave of personal documentaries, is both a compelling story and an eye-opening bit of social history.

A warm and honest portrait of a marriage at its most mysterious, and ordinary.

Through haunting home movies, Mina's diaries and interviews with Mike, a raw, riveting portrait emerges of what a child sees in his parents' relationship and what lies beneath.

Block has made a sad, delightful and half-accidental movie about his own parents.

A tonal triumph of true-life storytelling told with equal measures of tension and redemption.

Mr. Block has put his parents’ life, and his own, into this film with such warmth and candor that it may take more than one viewing to recognize it as a work of art.

Open-minded, probing but never prurient, 51 Birch Street is much more than a portrait of suburban ennui. It's a loving, painful map of the gulf between thought and word, between word and deed, that props up good marriages, and sends bad ones to hell.

What makes 51 Birch Street a moving revelation rather than a therapeutic exercise is Block's commitment to understanding his parents, Mike and Mina, on their own terms, regardless of what it does to his image of them.

Block, an experienced documentarian, does an outstanding job walking the knife-edge between personal and self-absorbed.