Critic Reviews

Here is a good and joyous man who leads a life that is perfect for him, and how many people do we meet like that? This movie made me happy every moment I was watching it.

What Press comes up with in the end isn't just a portrait of individual eccentricity. Its larger subject is the way one man, just by being alive to what's around him, has created a vast, detailed anthropological record of how New Yorkers present, and feel, about themselves.

If the film suggests that there's something bittersweet about a life dedicated to a single pursuit cultivated with an almost religious fervor, it also stands in awe of its subject's seemingly inexhaustible, self-abnegating capacity to remain attuned to the expression of others.

It's no insult to say that the fine documentary Bill Cunningham New York resembles one of those minor profiles found in The New Yorker's "Talk Of The Town" section: a slight, glancing, yet subtly wrought slice of New York life. And it seems likely that the exceedingly modest Cunningham would want it that way.

The documentary will resonate with New York Times' readers and fans of personal stories.

This fascinating documentary about famed photographer Bill Cunningham features interviews with Vogue editor Anna Wintour, author Tom Wolfe and New York Times publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr.

Rarely has anyone embodied contradictions as happily and harmoniously as octogenarian New York Times photographer Bill Cunningham.

The Bill Cunningham captured here is a puckish, eightysomething man with electric energy and a wish to devour all of New York through his camera lens.

Near the end Press poses a couple of personal questions that pierce the old man's defenses in the most painful and revealing way, suggesting a much more complicated emotional wellspring for the work that consumes his life.

As much as his admirers praise him, they also say they don't know much about him or his private life. Press opens a small window into that world.