Sketches of Frank Gehry (2005)
American Masters

Description

Frank Gehry has been responsible for the design of some of the most stunning buildings in the world including the Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles the Guggenheim Bilbao in Spain and the Experience Music Project in Seattle. As Gehry explains he begins each project by sketching the design.

Tags

Architecture

Collected reviews and ratings

9.2 Entertainment Weekly | Lisa Schwarzbaum

And danged if the seductive documentary - Pollack's first - doesn't come to resemble a Gehry building itself, all brash, eye-catching, a tad vain, and attractively neurotic.
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8.0 Variety | Todd McCarthy

Lucid and engaging, "Sketches of Frank Gehry" provides the enormously gratifying opportunity to spend an hour-and-a-half with an artistic giant.
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8.0 Amazon user reviews

Ironically Sydney Pollack's warm, intelligent portrait of his longtime friend, architect Frank Gehry, is probably the best film he's made in years.
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7.5 TV Guide | Maitland McDonagh

Veteran filmmaker Sydney Pollack's documentary debut, a chummy portrait of his friend Frank Gehry produced for the PBS American Masters series, is rescued from its inclination to smug, celebrity-testimonial-driven hagiography by Gehry's own considerable charm and infectious enthusiasm.
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7.5 Chicago Sun-Times | Roger Ebert

The result is not a formal doc but an extended chat between two professionals who, as Pollack puts it, search for "a sliver of space in the commercial world where you can make a difference."
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7.0 New York Times | A.O. Scott

At times "Sketches" seems to veer toward the genre of celebrity-talking-head mutual-appreciation documentary, in which famous people talk about other famous people, engaging in a form of tasteful, tactful log-rolling.
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7.0 Washington Post | Philip Kennicott

Pollack has an eye for visual space. The loving, even voluptuous way his camera captures the surface of Gehry's architecture reminds one of Edward Weston's black-and-white photographs of peppers.
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7.0 DVD Talk | Holly Beeman

Sydney's film portrays Frank in a very humanizing way, and his architectural structures in such a fashion that they really do just move you. At times, I actually felt my heart swell up, especially when looking at the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao. I might just have to take that trip to Europe sooner than I thought!
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6.0 Empire | Patrick Peters

A fond and always accessible portrait, but the lack of objectivity and drooling images of Gehry's work deprives this documentary of any objectivity.
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6.0 BBC | Matthew Leyland

Gushy but accessible, it plays like a middling South Bank Show special, although the scale of Gehry's work justifies a place on the big screen.
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