Antarctica: A Year on Ice

If beauty and revelation is your bottom line, Anthony Powell's rhapsodic Antarctica: A Year on Ice will prove a grand time at the movies.

"Antarctica" is successful because it operates on two complementary levels, the epic visuals whose grandeur can stagger you and the small-scale personal stories of the people who live and work down there.

Yes, it features some of the most rapturous footage of calving glaciers and ice floes — alternately freezing and thawing — that you’re likely to have seen (much of it captured on equipment designed and built by the filmmaker). But it is the simple glimpses of ordinary life in an extraordinary place that are the most stirring moments in the film.

In all, it’s an absorbing, straightforward look at a truly alien environment. The film could be nicely paired with Werner Herzog’s “Encounters at the End of the World” (2007), a much more idiosyncratic view of Antarctic strangeness.

The extremes of Antarctica: A Year on Ice might seem routine to fans of nature documentaries, but the photographer and director Anthony Powell produces some dazzling imagery in his droll study of isolation way, way down under.

Powell never achieves the absurdist, uncanny poetry of that scene in Herzog’s film where a “demented” penguin marches into oblivion, but he does arouse wonder at nature’s sublimity.

Anthony Powell's vision as a filmmaker is frustratingly limited to an information-style presentation that doubles as an enthusiastic advert for the transcendental qualities of the terrain.