49 Up (2005)
Granada Television

Description

Starting in 1964 with Seven Up, The UP Series has explored this Jesuit maxim. The original concept was to interview 14 children from diverse backgrounds from all over England, asking them about their lives and their dreams for the future. Every seven years, renowned director Michael Apted, a researcher for Seven Up, has been back to talk to them, examining the progression of their lives. From cab driver Tony to schoolmates Jackie, Lynn and Susan and the heart-breaking Neil, as they turn 49 more life-changing decisions and surprising developments are revealed. An extraordinary look at the structure of life in the 20th century.

Tags

1960s, 1970s, 2000s, 1990s, 1980s, Relationships, England

Collected reviews and ratings

10 Chicago Sun-Times | Roger Ebert

Michael Apted's "Up" series remains one of the great imaginative leaps in film.
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10 Los Angeles Times | Carina Chocano

Richer and more textured than its predecessors (each chapter includes interviews with the participants from every stage in the process), and more likely to inspire bouts of entirely defensible sentimentality (some reversals are nothing short of remarkable), "49 Up" is more than a deeply satisfying movie; it's a reminder of the wonder contained in ordinary lives.
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10 New York Times | A. O. Scott

Rarely has ordinary existence seemed so multifaceted and enigmatic, even in its banal everyday details.
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10 Salon.com | Andrew O'Hehir

As I see it, the point of Apted's series is to remind us that we all know success and failure, and that every so-called ordinary life is a zone of great drama and tremendous risk.
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10 Combustible Celluloid | Jeffrey M. Anderson

It's a real testament to just how fluid and undefined our lives really are, no matter how much control we believe we have or how much planning we do. Ultimately, the mission statement of 49 Up shouldn't be "Child is father to the man," but rather John Lennon's lyric: "Life is what happens while you're busy making other plans."
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10 documentaryfilms.net | Bryan Newbury

For the film fan, it is something akin to having a class reunion, Thanksgiving Dinner and a letter from a distant relative all at the same time. The opening sequence from 1964’s World in Action feature takes us back to the point we became aware of this groundbreaking work. Since Seven & Fourteen, Apted’s septennial look into the lives of English men and women from across the class and geographical spectrum has surpassed simply groundbreaking and been catapulted into the legendary realm. An argument could be made that it stands alone atop Olympus in the world of documentary filmmaking.
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10 PopMatters.com | Bill Gribon

The Up Series is a monumental achievement in cinema and DVD. It is hard to describe in plain and simple terms the impact and the power that these films really have.
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9.2 The Onion A.V. Club | Noel Murray

If the purpose of the Up series has been to show how class determines destiny in the UK, then what we've actually learned is that everyone there gets a fair shot to make it to the middle.
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9.0 Amazon user reviews

Watching them, we learn how they've faced the big issues of being human: dealing with their parents and upbringing; puberty; being open to the possibility of love; mating and breeding; finding their place in the world; the death of near and dear ones. Of course, watching them is like watching ourselves.
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9.0 San Francisco Chronicle | Mick LaSalle

Like the other films in the series, "49 Up" is alternately touching and mundane, part soap opera, part reality show and part anthropological study. It also qualifies as a bizarre experiment: Does getting filmed every seven years influence the way people live their lives?
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8.8 ReelViews | James Berardinelli

There's an element of voyeurism to this, but it's more than that. Whether we actually "know" these individuals or not is beside the point; we feel we do, and this enriches the experience of watching the most ambitious documentary project ever committed to celluloid.
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8.8 Austin Chronicle | Marjorie Baumgarten

What the series means in the long run is anybody's guess; I just know I sleep better at night knowing it's out there.
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8.0 filmcritic.com | Christopher Null

Finally, for the first time in years, the stories are told with grace and power, and the film really sucks you in. Now that Apted is in his 60s and he's hitting Up with its seventh installment, maybe he's finally determined the best way to present this material.
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8.0 Slant Magazine | Ed Gonzalez

.. these films affect their subjects not unlike they do their audience, serving not only as reminders of our mortality but as instruments to measure how much, or how little, we've accomplished in our short lives or struggled against the notion that we are all born slaves to an indestructible birthright.
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