Cuban Rafters

A heart-rending account of people trying to dodge the hurdles that politics puts in front of them. By the end of this humanist epic, some are ennobled by their struggle. Most are exhausted.

The creators of the magnificent Balseros stayed involved with its subject, a group of Cuban boat people who made it to the United States, for a full seven years. If you put in that kind of time, you witness life happening in front of you in all its compelling, confounding drama. What could be better than that?

Becalmed or bobbing along, they remain balseros -- but then, as this engrossing documentary suggests, so are we all.

Poignant, spirited, revealing.

Noteworthy for its detail and evenhandedness.

An ambitious, smartly edited documentary epic by a pair of journalists who tenaciously followed their subjects over the course of seven years, the film is both intimate and sweeping.

Balseros doesn't fully measure up to Michael Apted's work because of the dingy quality of its video-to-film transfer, as well as flaws inherent to a project that started as one type of documentary and ended up as another--namely, that the filmmakers didn't ask enough of the right questions in the first two installments to make the third fully connect.