The first time I saw “The Straight Story,” I focused on the foreground and liked it. The second time I focused on the background, too, and loved it. The movie isn’t just about the old Alvin Straight’s odyssey through the sleepy towns and rural districts of the Midwest, but about the people he finds to listen and care for him. You’d think it was a fantasy, this kindness of strangers, if the movie weren’t based on a true story. Roger Ebert

[This] is an example of an artist in peak form. James Berardinelli