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Since Reel Paradise doesn't make the mistake of lionizing Pierson while it keeps up with him and his family, the results stay with you, like memories of an unexpected and surprising vacation.
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80Reel Paradise is a deliberately untidy, open-ended, thoroughly absorbing chronicle that lets the lives of its characters spill across the screen without editorializing.
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78True, the melodrama on display here can't compare to the likes of Larry, Moe, Curly, and the cannibals, but then this goofily charming quartet of Western outsiders is far more real than reel.
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75The Piersons went, they showed movies, they returned. Taveuni is more or less the same. But by living and coping together for a year, the family is probably stronger and richer.
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75While type-A Pierson worries about his projectionist showing up and a break-in at his family's home, his wife frets that the mass importation of American films will contaminate the local culture.
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75An engaging if overlong documentary.
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It's an engrossing and often very funny tale.
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70"Survivor" meets "Cinema Paradiso"in this wonderfully entertaining documentary about a film fanatic's quest to bring Hollywood movies to a remote South Sea island.
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70An honest look at the experience of a family who lives a yearlong tropical movie adventure on a remote island in Fiji.
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70There's something magical about seeing a packed house of 300 Taveuni locals laugh equally uproariously, and, without a nanosecond’s worth of culture shock, at Queen Latifah in "Bringing Down the House" and Buster Keaton in "Steamboat Bill, Jr."
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70The uproarious laughter that floats from the cinema wonderfully illustrates the universality of the moviegoing experience.
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70Overlong at nearly two hours but still a sharp and amusing and subtle piece of filmmaking.
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70A documentary that uses Pierson's self-congratulatory mission to explore a deeper story about cultural clashes and the complex dynamics of the modern American family.
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70The film is absorbing enough as an intimate family portrait, complete with friction.
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63An amusingly damning portrait of a man trying to impose his will on a world that, really, has better things to do.
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60The Piersons are warm, funny people, and most of Reel Paradise shows them comically bickering with each other and laughing at the absurdity of the whole project.
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60Although it will most readily appeal to cinephiles…offers sufficient reality-based incident and ponderable cultural issues to attract curious audiences.
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50The result is a gorgeous, third-person version of an extended family-vacation movie that the Piersons, their friends and their former Fijian neighbors can enjoy for years to come.
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50Not sure we need to know this much about his family life.
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Pierson, with his carrot-thin frame, gogglish specs, and gnashingly quick temper, traipses around Taveuni like the king of the white-man geeks, alternately proclaiming the saintliness of his crusade and throwing tantrums whenever somebody else fails to sufficiently recognize it.
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Unfortunately, what could have been a superficially amusing IFC reality series was stretched into a thin, overlong feature that follows the rocky integration of this very New York clan into a somewhat ruffled island society.
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25Pierson is a high-powered egotist with appalling tastes and a great-white-father complex, and his whiny family is about as much fun as fingernails on a blackboard.