All Fall Down

"Piecing together the various narratives of Philip Hoffman's brilliant All Fall Down, his first feature-length work after innumerable magnificent shorts, is one of the most invigorating and rewarding pleasures you're likely to have in a cinema this year. Merging a personal essay with a regional history, All Fall Down is constructed from artifacts, beginning obliquely with scratched, black-and-white aerial footage of southern Ontario and an agitated man describing the deterioration of his health on the soundtrack. The voice belongs to writer George Lachlan Brown, whose life took an unforeseen and tragic course when he was in his thirties. Seen only in home-movie footage and heard on countless phone messages that grow increasingly aggravated