Chris & Don: A Love Story Reviews
Top Critic
Despite an age difference of 30 years, their connection was immediately electric; their first kiss, the story goes, broke a window.
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| Original Score: 3/4
Surprisingly, this 2007 documentary about their 34-year relationship becomes more engrossing as its focus shifts from Isherwood to Bachardy...
There's a bit of Pygmalion meets The Portrait of Dorian Gray to it, and yet part of the documentary's slyness involves probing those aspects while never losing sight of the pain and glories of any emotional relationship that lasts as long as
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| Original Score: 3.5/4
With delectable-looking home movies of the couple's travels in California and Europe, Chris and Don offers an intimate portrayal of a passionate, enduring association, as well as a social history of postwar life.
Santi and Mascara are right to call their film A Love Story, because this is the portrait of a marriage as full and enviable as the greatest unions in literature.
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| Original Score: 4/4
The subtitle of the film is 'A Love Story.' The picture makes the worn term fresh, moving.
The work is a reflective hodgepodge of unnervingly 'cute' animation, reenactments, archival footage, and Bachardy's own reminiscences, spoken in the singular British accent he invented just as he invented his own unorthodox life.
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| Original Score: B+
Chris & Don: A Love Story examines a complicated and enduring relationship that raised eyebrows even in Hollywood.
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| Original Score: 4/5
[A] much-celebrated documentary from the festival circuit.
What could have been sordid emerges instead as fiercely funny and touching. Even the animated sequences featuring the lovers the way they imagined themselves - Chris as a horse, Don as a cat - resonate with feeling and blunt truth.
| Original Score: 3/4
Though a bit too conventional to perfectly reflect the unique affair at its center, Chris & Don is likely to inspire romantics of all kinds.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/4
While they might have had their ups and downs, the subjects of Chris & Don are a testament to fidelity.
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| Original Score: 2.5/4
Chris & Don opts too often for the cute over the wrenching.
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| Original Score: 3/6
Chris & Don: A Love Story does what a good documentary should. It informs the mind and broadens the horizon while never losing its entertainment value.
Primed as we are by a culture rich in both homophobia and dirty old men, we can be forgiven for anticipating a sordid cautionary tale. It's a shock -- a happy shock -- when Chris & Don recounts a love that approaches the transcendental.
