'Into Great Silence'

"Into Great Silence" is a transcendent, transporting experience, a trance movie that casts a major league spell by going deeply into a monastic world that lives largely without words. In the hands of filmmaker Philip Groning, it becomes clear that silence is not the absence of sound, it's a physical place, a destination with value and meaning in a chaotic world, arrived at with difficulty and departed with regret.

By Kenneth Turan

March 9, 2007