Critic wrangle: "Trouble the Water."

2008-08-22 19:00:01

Another Sundance film, this one the winner of the Grand Jury Prize, also hits theaters today -- Carl Deal and Tia Lessin's documentary about New Orleans during and after Hurricane Katrina, "Trouble the Water," uses footage shot by Lower Ninth Ward resident Kimberly Robert to chronicle the devastation of the storm. And reviews would indicate it does so aptly: Jim Ridley, writing at the Village Voice, calls it "history captured in the visual grammar of Cloverfield," and adds that "[t]he resilience of the movie's subjects--survivors of street crime and drugs and HIV--irradiates Trouble the Water like sunshine." Manohla Dargis at the New York Times finds that the filmmakers "have created an ingeniously fluid narrative structure that, when combined with Ms. Roberts's visuals, news material and their own original 16-millimeter film footage, ebbs and flows like great drama." "In many ways, I think Kim Roberts' authorship, not just of her amazing...

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