Throughout his career Frederick Wiseman has dared explore directly the fullest range of human experience. In film after film he has rendered us as we are — the complexities, ambiguities, ironies, inconsistencies, contradictions that inform our life. He is, really, kin to some of our writers of short fiction, anxious to comprehend through a particular angle of vision our contingent lives: the way we are shaped by institutions, certainly, but the way we may stand up to them, take only so much from them, or find our own ways of breaking free of them. His careful, respectful, persistent regard for plain, ordinary people puts him in the company of writers such as Raymond Carver, Richard Ford, Bobbie Ann Mason, Toni Morrison, James McPherson…

–Robert Coles, The New Republic