Now & Then: From Frosh to Senior

College kids feel at ease being scrutinized by the empathetic filmmaking team of Dan Geller and Danya Goldfine. That pair's Frosh: Nine Months in a Freshman Dorm, which they made at Stanford University in the early 1990s, was such an agreeably non-judgmental peek behind the scenes of university life that they decided to make a sequel. Now & Then: From Frosh to Seniors, another triumph, takes the same students and brings them up through graduation.

The three African-American students all move away from white friendships. An insecure sports-obsessed guy with no girlfriends rises to be president of his fraternity. A Chinese-American obsessed with business and banking graduates to an anxious career in the monetary world. The one declared bisexual as a freshman realizes that he's gay, truly gay.

You might be tempted to compare this film to the 28-Up series, but there's no way a movie as restricted as Now & Then can compete with Michael Apted's monumental examination of England's class system. Geller and Goldfine nonetheless have their epiphanies: the ditsy blonde who turns into an articulate feminist-studies major; the out-of-her-element African-American girl (her mother is a crack addict) who becomes, miraculously, the only senior allowed to teach her own course.

-- Gerald Peary