The Legend of Pale Male

This is compelling stuff, but Lilien is less successful in trying to link Pale Male's story to his own.

Family-friendly holiday fare.

You won't find a tale more true to our city than the extraordinary history of Pale Male. It's just unfortunate that Frederic Lilien's documentary is as clunky as his subject is graceful.

A sugary, aggressively anthropomorphized story of one avian interloper and a whole bunch of human obsessives.

Despite spending nearly 15 years documenting this phenomenon, Lilien proves wholly uninterested in investigating his human subjects' habit of vigorously anthropomorphizing, and projecting their personal hopes, dreams, fears, and Daddy issues onto the striking hawk.

Lilien certainly captures Pale Male's wild animal beauty in loving close-up. What his film needs, however, is distance.

Lilien is an amateur filmmaker, and his movie -- which at times is more about Lilien than Pale Male -- shows it.