John McEnroe: In the Realm of Perfection

All credit to Faurat for that ability to forge coherence out of such wildly disparate materials.

In the end, [Faraut] doesn't have quite enough of anything for a feature.

"Perfection" at times risks being too pleased with itself for its own good, but its one-of-a-kind credentials are never in doubt.

McEnroe, Faraut asserts, was "a man who played on the edge of his senses." His film brings that home.

Regardless of his enemy, the main event was McEnroe vs. McEnroe, in an unresolvable tiebreak of body and soul. There had been nothing like it, on public view, since the heyday of James Dean.

"John McEnroe: In the Realm of Perfection" is a sports documentary unlike any other, a beguiling and delightful piece of visionary non-fiction that uses its namesake to investigate the ontological nature of watching tennis.

The only tennis documentary to set Sonic Youth's cyberpunk ode The Sprawl to a technique montage, Julien Faraut's wonderfully original film mixes film theory, cryptic analysis, and multiple break(ing) points to form a coolly intoxicating examination.

...at times the film feels like every character in a Wes Anderson movie got up and made a documentary on tennis.

It's a different kind of sports film that caught my attention despite not being a tennis fan.

...proving that sport itself can be fundamentally cinematic and ripe with psychological drama when documented in a manner outside of the traditional systems designed for live or television viewing.

Faraut is less interested in how cinema affects tennis than how they overlap. He's searching for the line separating reality from performance, [proving] one doesn't exist.

There's a strange allure to the film, how it whimsically and playfully approaches one of the greatest tennis players to play the game from such unexpected angles.