Charlie Victor Romeo

The ritualized presentation of these disasters... adds up to a kind of unsettling spiritual experience, a communion with the dead that demands the quiet participation of a group

Charlie Victor Romeo shows us how much of life's weight and meaning can be packed into one second of thought or action; it's a work of shivery intimacy.

Whatever reservations it prompts, the film is innovative, original, and queasily effective.

That the same performers keep returning in different roles, playing Peruvian and Japanese flyers as well as American ones, only adds to the sense of man as machine. Everything, and everyone, must run like clockwork. Yet no apparatus is foolproof.

A unique, unsettling experience.

As seen in Charlie Victor Romeo (code for “Cockpit Voice Recorder”), the events are almost unbearably gripping.

The small company of actors make convincing pilots, flight attendants, and air-traffic controllers, but their activities, tragic and brave though they may be, quickly grow monotonous.