Ellen Hovde

To commemorate the first century of American filmmaking, the American Film Institute embarked on a celebration of America's greatest movies from the first 100 years of American cinema — 1896-1996.

Based on eight years of continued prosperity, presidents and economists alike confidently predicted that America would soon enter a time when there would be no more poverty, no more depressions -- a "New Era" when everyone could be rich. But when reality finally struck, the consequences of such unbound optimism shocked the world.

This film is made up of three segments that share no plot but have a general thematic relationship. In the first segment, Virginia and her three children are left by her shiftless husband and she is courted by an old beau who is now married. In the second, a divorced woman reacts to some unexpected revelations from her aged father. In the third, childless, middle-aged social worker is swept into an affair with cab driver Dennis, and finds herself pregnant.

Edie Bouvier Beale and her mother, Edith, two aging, eccentric relatives of Jackie Kennedy Onassis, are the sole inhabitants of a Long Island estate. The women reveal themselves to be misfits with outsized, engaging personalities. Much of the conversation is centered on their pasts, as mother and daughter now rarely leave home.

The Maysles profile a poor white Georgian family struggling to survive with the realities of thirteen children.