Some Kind of Heaven

Oppenheim relishes in the strange beauty of their lives with Rockwellian precision, and the bigger picture remains elusive throughout. Look closer, however, and the movie makes a sobering point, whether or not Oppenheim intended it .

Some Kind of Heaven effortlessly blends humor and pathos into a memorable and at times unsettling study on where life's trajectory might land us, and that is a concept that deserves more than mild contemplation.

Oppenheim resists easy misanthropy, showing unexpected empathy for people who have cocooned themselves from the outside world, only to confront its headaches anyway.

The film deepens and grows more thoughtful - and, yes, sad - as its spotlight on the need for human connection - at any age - comes into focus.

The film is most tragic and humorous when hints of the outside world break through the suffocatingly cheerful façade of the Villages.

I hazard to think that the film's mutual curiosity gives Some Kind of Heaven its vivifying spirit, that transforms what might have been familiarly charming and smirkily knowing into something more troubling, elusive, and enduring.

[T]he movie leaves us feeling the need for more-more about this place, some other resident, about the subjects themselves.

The film rambles somewhat, and a split-screen sequence clashes tonally with the rest of the film. But overall, it shines as a seriocomic document of how fantasy can't cure conditions like unhappy marriages and loneliness.

Rather than lampoon the wretched excess, the filmmaker develops character studies, unveiling something more bitter than sweet in this dessert topping of a town.

This absorbing doc takes us inside a fascinating parallel universe, as elders golf, dance, swim, flirt, cheerlead, do karate, play tennis and binge movies in the place envisioned as the Disneyland of retirees.