Critic Reviews

“Art isn’t easy,” wrote Stephen Sondheim, and in Jody Lee Lipes’ bleak beauty of a documentary, the act of creation is a resolutely joyless one — a tedious grind with little lasting reward.

Ballet 422 is more visually sumptuous than most narratives you're likely to see this year, featuring careful compositions that make watching the film an aesthetic experience as much as an intellectual one.

In a way, Lipes’s documentary resembles Jonathan Demme and David Byrne’s “Stop Making Sense” (1984) — in which Byrne goes on stage solo with a beat box and the rest of the Talking Heads gather one by one — as much as it does Wiseman’s films.

A documentary that’s both impressionistic and informative—admiring the magic of dance even in its formative stages, while also turning the making of art into a kind of procedural.

Ballet 422 elegantly conveys the complex collaborations behind even a relatively modest production, and the toil and discipline that somehow deliver, for the patrons on opening night, a seamless spectacle of grace.

The documentary moves with the same fluidity that characterizes Peck’s choreography.

Intimate and unusual behind-the-scenes look at the creation of a ballet, it may sound rarefied but has enough moments of truth and beauty to engage general audiences.

Jody Lee Lipes shapes the footage into an intimate symphony of poetically shaped bodies that contrast poignantly with uncertain faces.

A delightfully immersive look at how a ballet is created, Jody Lee Lipes’ documentary is a stark contrast to the psycho theatrics of something like “Black Swan.”

The irony of Peck’s position is, while he’s on the rise as a choreographer, as a dancer he’s in a rather more plebian position, which provides the movie with a punchline that Lipes neither overstates nor shrugs off.