आलोचक समीक्षाएं

Soucy’s documentary joyfully fulfills the mission of educating and entertaining, infused with the tremendous delight and loyalty of all those who worked with this seemingly magical production group.

More analysis of the films would have enriched this entertaining chronicle, but it remains a rollicking account of the most important movie partnership since Powell and Pressburger.

This documentary includes witty and insightful interviews with MI stalwarts like Thompson and Hugh Grant; it is a great pleasure to watch and will send people back to Merchant Ivory films themselves, particularly perhaps their Quartet (1981) and The Golden Bowl (2000).

Merchant Ivory ultimately feels like a a devoted document of a group of artists who lived complicated, interesting lives. And while this film may not fully capture that complexity, there are forty films they made that get to the heart of the matter.

The interviews are the best part of the film, which lacks the sleek, focused, concentrated quality of the best Merchant Ivory movies but succeeds on its own terms as sort of a “hangout” movie, non-fiction division.

The documentary gets by on its interviews, archival footage and fascinating subjects, who in some respects always seemed like stalwarts of a fusty tradition.

Like many documentaries of this sort, “Merchant Ivory” opts to be a survey without a thesis — informative, even engaging, but lacking an argument that might drive the documentary itself forward.

The film ends far too neatly and with a speedy pass over the failures, but there is much here to savour.

This sloppy, scattered documentary, very much lacking the refinement of Merchant Ivory’s own films, is a missed opportunity to explore why their films are great, what exactly is it that makes viewers return to them time and time again.

The duo’s Indian collaborators are largely absent though, and it all comes together in a rather shallow, often frustrating attempt to bottle up a significant piece of late 20th century film history, devoid of that touch of Merchant Ivory movie magic.