Magic Trip

Gibney and Ellwood struggle to create context for or make much sense of the vibrant hodge-podge of material that they excavated from the archives of Kesey, who died in 2001. Full Review

The title's accurate; there are lots of minor but magical moments, like witnessing the accidental invention of tie-dye. Full Review

The filmmakers' fidelity to their source material is admirable, but more historical context could have made this Trip as illuminating as it is magical. Full Review

What it lacks, perhaps unavoidably, is a sense of the cosmic Now; the movie recovers, without exactly illuminating, a "long, strange trip" that seems all the stranger as it recedes into the past. Full Review

Neither as magic nor as trippy as the culture quake that it documents, but it's a valuable flashback and a pleasurable contact high. Full Review