Brady Bunch Home Movies

Never was a Brady Bunch fan, and didn't bother to see the recent movie, so you should take my praise of Brady Bunch Home Movies with however much salt you like. The hook of this trip down memory lane is that the late Robert Reed (a.k.a. dad Mike Brady) gave the original TV cast Super-8 movie cameras one Christmas, and some of that footage has been incorporated into this salute. (It's the kids making funny faces at each other, mostly — but you can sense budding hormones at work. When the girls bat their eyes at the camera, the frame shakes a little.) Writer-director Daniel Helfgott keeps things simple, interpolating home movies with quick profiles of each Brady star, and these vivid sketches reveal the actors' personalities. The show concludes with a truly touching remembrance of Reed, who died in 1992 of AIDS-related causes. This is one reunion show that doesn't exploit nostalgia but transcends it. B+