Barbara Kopple re-enters the arena of her admirable Harlan County, U.S.A., that of the labor dispute. But she has not just repeated herself. The laborers this time are meatpackers instead of mine workers, but more significantly the time itself has moved on into the mid-1980s, the era of Reaganomics, and by the time Kopple would complete the project she would be fifteen years older than her twenty-four years at the end of the other one, and commensurately broader, deeper, and more complex in her vision. Some of the strike organizers themselves have reportedly expressed unhappiness with the movie. Well: they have good reason to be unhappy, but not with the movie. What happened happened. (It didn't go well; it went long and it went divisively.) The movie simply bears witness to it, putting the proverbial human face on a dry and distant news story, and becoming in the process an irreplaceable social and historical document for posterity, an essential reference work for any student of the Eighties. And something more, besides: a personal and psychological document that maps out the ever-present, everywhere-present, and heart-rending gap between idealism (or ideology) and reality, between self-image (or self-delusion) and the unkind mirror. (1991) — Duncan Shepherd