GLASS

In anticipation of his friend Philip Glass’s 70th birthday, filmmaker Scott Hicks [Shine] documented a year in the life of the contemporary concert hall’s best-known composer. The result is a 12-part ‘mosaic portrait’ of Glass that follows him across several continents showing him at work and at home. Glass’s own accounts of himself are contrasted with a gamut of other views, both music-related and devastatingly personal. (“I don’t know what you’re going to do about Philip’s wives. We’ve already decided we’re not going to tell you anything about them,” says Glass’s sister.) “Glass’s status as one of America’s most venerated and mocked highbrows matches gracefully with his peripatetic cultural and spiritual life; he may not define himself exclusively as a Buddhist, but his frequent self-targeted laughter and robust playfulness at physical-meditation sessions are so clearly engrained, not affected, that he often seems like a jolly, music-consumed monk.” — Bill Weber, Slant