A look at the life, passions, achievements and tragedies surrounding the famous explorer and environmentalist Jacques Cousteau, featuring an archive of his newly restored footage.... (Full plot summary below)
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A look at the life, passions, achievements and tragedies surrounding the famous explorer and environmentalist Jacques Cousteau, featuring an archive of his newly restored footage.
Leave your thoughts about Becoming Cousteau.
| VarietyOwen GleibermanBecoming Cousteau, Liz Garbus’s ardent and transporting documentary, is one of those movies that puts a life together so beautifully that you feel it heightening your awareness of everyday things. |
| New York Magazine (Vulture)Bilge EbiriIn restoring Cousteau’s human side, Becoming Cousteau shows us both his brilliance and his shortcomings, and it suggests that these extremes were fundamentally connected. He was soft-spoken and modest on the surface yet consumed by an ambition that was driven as much by his remorse as by his vision. |
| RogerEbert.comTomris LafflyWhile it on the whole doesn’t feel as engrossing as some of the filmmaker’s former, more innovative movies (the terrific What Happened, Miss Simone? comes to mind), Becoming Cousteau is still as immersive and warmly inviting as non-fiction biographies come. |
| Los Angeles TimesRobert AbeleBecoming Cousteau may not be as deep a journey as some would hope, but for having to chart a lot of years, it hits its points about passion, fame and activism smartly, even movingly. |
| The PlaylistChris BarsantiWhere “Becoming Cousteau” frustrates at times is its thin treatment of Cousteau’s work. The films and shows are represented with plentiful footage but not truly discussed or differentiated. It’s an odd choice, given Cousteau’s cinematic obsession. |
| San Francisco ChronicleG. Allen JohnsonAs the documentary was produced by National Geographic with the cooperation of the Cousteau Society, Garbus has access to some fabulous, colorfully restored footage, some of it never before seen, that makes this an eye-popping experience — in theaters especially. |
| Austin ChronicleSteve DavisThough this capable documentary is comprehensively informative in so many ways (perhaps to a fault), the one thing it doesn’t quite convey is the wonder and marvel of the undersea world of Cousteau, which continued to move him until his death at age 87. |
| The Hollywood ReporterFrank ScheckConsistently engrossing as well as informative, the film delivers a richly humanistic portrait of a complex, indefatigable figure who introduced multiple awestruck generations to the wonders beneath the sea. |
| The A.V. ClubNoel MurrayWhat this fascinating, thoughtful documentary is really about is how even an icon can evolve. The “becoming” part of a life never really ends. |
| IndieWireKristen LopezGarbus takes the standard documentary route of examining Cousteau’s life from birth to death, and while individual elements of his life are compelling in the first half, the documentary seems to come alive more towards its second half. Maybe that’s because Cousteau was just doing so much toward the latter half of his career, but the pacing seems to feel livelier the closer things get to the end. |
