If you’re looking for a fright at the movies, skip Friday the 13th and hunker down with Must Read After My Death. Using archived audiotapes and home movies, the documentary chronicles the tumultuous suburban marriage of the filmmaker’s grandparents, who “lived on the unmapped border between Revolutionary Road and clinical madness,” Joe Morgenstern writes in the Wall Street Journal.
Charley is a womanizing alcoholic, and Allis, a guilt-ridden nonconformist, saved their Dictaphone communications. The result is a “disquietingly intimate portrait of a 1960s American family falling apart,” writes Manohla Dargis of the New York Times, though she’s troubled by its “demand for exploitation.” Rogert Ebert, who watched the film “horrified and fascinated,” calls it “a cry from the grave.”
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