Critic Reviews

Remake is emotionally shattering.

Remake is extraordinarily clear-eyed for a work so broken-hearted: at once a home movie, an intimate diary and an expansive study of the filmmaker’s purpose, constantly disrupting its own conclusions with expressions of anger, amusement and still-unresolved confusion.

Remake, like all of McElwee’s personal cinema, embody the passage of time itself. In other words, it’s the stuff of life.

McElwee probes the very idea of memory itself, and in perhaps his crowning achievement as a documentarian, fails to come up with any definitive answers, yet somehow still moves closer to the truth than he ever had before.

Remake is certainly a movie about memory, especially bad memories, but in a Proustian sense it’s a movie in search of lost time — both the time McElwee spent with his son and the time slipping away as the director and his peers grow old and die.

It’s a touching and moving homage that reminds us of the precious spirit that directs us towards remembering the deep love we have for family, through all its ups and downs.

Few films have been more unsparingly intimate.