In The Beaches of Agnès, you get addicted to watching Agnès Varda watch the world.

This is a lovely, quirky and not a little poignant film from Agnès Varda.

The images are as delightful, unexpected and playfully uninhibited as Ms. Varda, perhaps the only filmmaker who has both won the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival and strolled around an art exhibition while costumed as a potato (not at the same time).

If The Beaches Of Agnès has no clear structure, that's only because neither does Varda’s life--except in retrospect.

One job of memoir is to show the world through another's eyes and inspire you to live more alertly, and that is the glory of The Beaches of Agnès.

A genuinely playful wander down memory-lane by one of France's most revered film-makers, it's sufficiently erudite and extract-packed to satisfy cinephiles but also accessible to those for whom her name rings only vague bells.

In a sense, Varda has done for herself what she did for Demy--creating a work, as charming as it is touching, that serves to explicate and enrich an entire oeuvre.

A lovely bit of memory and mischief.

A sentimental, whimsical autobiography.

Oddball mix that may strike some as overly whimsical but should delight the filmmaker's many fans.