Timely bulletin from Michael Apted on the motley Brits he has been checking in on, at seven-year intervals, ever since they were seven years old. It would be easy for the American moviegoer, introduced to them three movies ago at the age of twenty-eight, to have become blasé about the matter. It would be only a little more difficult for him to marvel anew at the uniqueness of the project, even to lament that other filmmakers in other countries never thought to copy it. Although there is hardly a whole movie's worth of new material in it, Apted has done an expert job of shuffling in the old material, filling in each step of the journey, so that even a newcomer to the series might feel at home. New developments -- new jobs, new relationships, new kids -- are minimal; and histrionics, outside of some general grumbles from the participants about the periodic imposition of the camera and one specific threat to discontinue, are nil. Yet any one of these ordinary people, with their ordinary insecurities and ordinary defenses, their ordinary aspirations and ordinary disappointments, remains inexhaustibly interesting. And the spectacle of advancing age has by now begun to edge up to the epic. (2005) — Duncan Shepherd
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