I'm not sure whether My Architect, which I saw with Bessie the other night at Lincoln Center, is the last great documentary of 2003 or the first great documentary of 2004. Either way, it's a subtle, amazing movie. It's about architect Louis I. Kahn, who died of a heart attack in the men's room at Penn Station when his (illegitimate) son was only eleven, leaving behind three different families and one enormous unfinished project, the capital complex of Bangladesh. More than twenty years later, the son, documentary filmmaker Nathaniel Kahn, embarks on a journey to see his father's buildings and to interview his colleagues, lovers, children, admirers, enemies, and the occasional stranger (like the man who discovered his father's body in that railway bathroom).

My Architect lacks the immediate punch of a movie like Capturing the Friedmans, but it's even more intricate and complicated, and it lingers in your memory for days. Hyperbole aside, it really does deserve comparison to Citizen Kane as an attempt to reconstruct a man's life through the memories of his surviving friends and contemporaries. It may even surpass Kane as a meditation on youth and old age. Movies can do many miraculous things, but it's their ability to juxtapose the image of a young man and, suddenly, the same man thirty years later that I find most moving and astonishing. My Architect is full of moments like that, as well as moments of surprising clarity on such diverse subjects as love, loneliness, architecture, family, and Jewishness. It's a monument, but delicate and evanescent, and one of several great recent movies about sons and their fathers.