A welcome trend in recent moviegoing is the increased willingness of audiences to spend time in the company of documentaries. The past couple of years have seen movies such as Bowling for Columbine, Spellbound, Bus 174, Capturing the Friedmans, and Winged Migration holding their relative own at the box office. Since this hasn't always been the case, fans of the last title -- the breathtakingly photographed nature documentary -- are directed to the new DVD release of a little treasure from the same producers that they might have missed: 1996's outstanding Microcosmos.Its subject, at first glance, is one of the ickiest imaginable: bugs. Given this reviewer's uneasy relationship with the lifeform (grasshoppers in particular freak me out completely), no one could have convinced me that I would leave a documentary about the day-to-day lives of insects in anything but a state of sustained panic. And yet Microcosmos remains among my very favorite nature documentaries or, for that matter, documentaries of any kind.
Continue reading: Microcosmos Review