42 Up (1998)
BBC, Granada

Description

In 1964, Granada's "World in Action" team, including a young Michael Apted (Coal Miner's Daughter, Gorky Park, Gorillas in the Mist), interviewed a diverse group of seven-year-olds from across England, asking them to describe their lives and hopes. The original "7 Up" was a beguilingly unselfconscious social self-portrait from a time when cinema was still young and television an infant — in fact, "7 Up" was television's first experiment in recording real people living their real lives.

Over the years, as Apted has tenaciously pursued the Up series, revisiting the children every seven years as they have grown up, navigating the divides between childhood dreams and adult reality, not all have participated in each succeeding film. Some have reacted against the series' intrusiveness. Others have embraced their roles.

Tags

1960s, 1970s, 1990s, 1980s, Relationships, England

Collected reviews and ratings

10 Amazon user reviews

Followers of the series will enjoy revisiting some of the more colorful and personable characters and will find a gratifying sense of hope in the turnaround of social dropout Neil, but no previous viewing is necessary to enjoy this portrait. 42 Up finds the remarkable humanity and strength of these ordinary people and their everyday lives, and that's an accomplishment few films can boast.
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10 Chicago Sun-Times | Roger Ebert

Forced to confront themselves at 7, 14, 21, 28 and 35, they seem mostly content with the way things have turned out. Will they all live to 49? Will the series continue until none are alive? This series should be sealed in a time capsule. It is on my list of the 10 greatest films of all time, and is a noble use of the medium.
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10 ReelViews | James Berardinelli

Michael Apted's The Up Series is not only documentary filmmaking at its finest, but it is an important sociological study. How many movies can make that claim?
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10 New York Times | Janet Maslin

When this hugely ambitious project began, it was a longitudinal study of class divisions among English schoolchildren. But time and persistence have turned it into much more.
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10 efilmcritic.com

When it comes to the modern documentary, Michael Apted's Up series is pretty much at the top of the heap. Innovative, prescient and totally groundbreaking, these documentaries chart a social and personal journey just as absorbing as any fictional feature film.
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10 Combustible Celluloid | Jeffrey M. Anderson

... the films demonstrate how difficult, if not impossible, it is to move in social class in England. Indeed, these films really ought to be social science experiments and would be quite boring if not for the vivid human connection.
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10 DVD Talk | Bill Gribon

The Up Series is phenomenal. There is nothing else like it in the history of cinema, both in the documentary and straight narrative format. It proves the age-old adage that truth is stranger and more dramatic than fiction, and as a film series, it never once fails to move and manipulate you.
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10 PopMatters.com | Bill Gribon

The Up Series (as all the films are referred to) stand as a terrific, tantalizing time capsule of personal growth and human development. Available again on DVD from First Run Features, it is epic filmmaking at its most interpersonal.
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9.2 DVD Verdict | Elizabeth Skipper

I can't think of anyone who wouldn't get something out of viewing the six installments of The Up Series.
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8.3 The Onion A.V. Club | Scott Tobias

The common themes in 42 Up are reconciliation and regret, a pervasive feeling amongst the participants that they're forever wedded to the sum result of their successes and failures.
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8.0 Variety | Eddie Cockrell

Film's most consistent social experiment continues apace with "42 Up".
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8.0 San Francisco Chronicle | Edward Guthmann

This is an amazing record of a group of lives -- and probably more resonant than anyone could have imagined when the project began. The program's original intent was to show the ways in which the British class system predetermine a life, but at this point the focus has shifted, inevitably, to themes of maturity, mortality and the lessons of middle age.
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7.5 Austin Chronicle | Marjorie Baumgarten

At times it seems as if the entire British empire has been lined up for questioning. Still, this movie is a living artifact that does what movies do best: exist in time. May this series continue up, up, and beyond.
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4.0 filmcritic.com | Christopher Null

Michael Apted's ambitious but uniformly unenlightening Seven Up! series drags us down a familiar road, kicking and screaming all the way.
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