The Royal Road

As personal as it is political, Olson's meditative project offers a profound lesson on intimacy and history — and the ways in which both are distorted and remade by memory.

What keeps The Royal Road from feeling like its trapped in amber is the genuine heartbreak that Olson clearly feels, the rawness of her emotions and her dedicated willingness to share.

While this free-ranging agenda might easily have seemed overly random or pretentious, Olson’s confessional tenor lends it all a stream-of-consciousness intimacy.

If this ambitious film never quite coheres into a single whole, something that an artificial division into several chapters only helps to underline, it does provide a lot to chew on along the way.

The cumulative effect is altogether perplexing, as it's difficult to tell if Olson's trying to upend clichés or settle for them.

Ms. Olson’s images are often captivating, but too often undercut by the aforementioned aspiring-to-the-dialectical voice-over, which is awkwardly written, and delivered with a lack of affect that grows tedious over the course of an hour.