The picture gently caricatures the folk music scene with dozens of delicate brush strokes, creating a picture that's increasingly, gloriously funny -- as in entire lines of dialogue are lost because the audience's laughing so hard.

Another unforetold career acme: Christopher Guest's seductive and brilliantly modulatory A Mighty Wind, which trains its laser-sight on the decaying legacy of Peter, Paul and Mary-style pop-folk.

A movie that re-creates its object of satire with such pitch-perfect flair that it all but erases the line between derision and love.

Mr. Guest and Mr. Levy's jokes are sometimes so subtle as to seem imperceptible, until you realize that they are everywhere, from the broadest gestures to the tiniest details of dress and décor.

The triumph of A Mighty Wind is that it makes an audience love the sing-along catchiness of folk and still break up at its banalities. This tiny titan of a movie is a perfect melding of form and content.

There are no sacred cows in A Mighty Wind. Even beloved public television is skewered by Guest and Co. In a lot of ways, this movie pokes the most fun at the average PBS liberal who refuses to let go of the 1960s.

The sweetest and funniest of Guest's true-life fake-umentaries.

The jokes would be funny even if they weren't perfectly timed, but what makes them come across as so poignant is the seriousness with which the director and his co-conspirators deliver their jabs and japes.

Achingly funny movie...Guest has cultivated a stock company of players whose work together is so intuitively sharp that it seems to redefine the boundaries of acting.

Almost to a one, the people Guest casts are virtuosos, and he lets them hit notes they can't hit anywhere else.

Guest has proven to be this era's master of humanist satire.

It's a fine-grained picture that goes for the sideways laughs rather than the straight-ahead ones. This is sketch comedy as method acting.

A new kind of affectionate satire which is all but indistinguishable from an embrace. [5 May 2003, p. 104]

There's an extra dimension here, not present in the other comedies. Not only is the material amusing, it's charmingly engaging.