A genuinely original work...                                                                               
                                                     David W. Leitner (Filmmaker Magazine, Du-Art Labs​)

Don Barry took me by surprise. It's both strange and wonderful.​ One of the last surviving members of the heroic generation of independent lyric film artists, Barry Gerson's films are works of almost unbearable aesthetic precision. Paul Smart's documentary follows him to Mexico, as a visiting professor. Soon the narrative melds with memory and imagination, as Gerson becomes a knight-errant in his own Quixotic tale.
                                                               Raymond Foye (Hanuman Books, Brooklyn Rail)
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I appreciate Don Barry and think it is original and engaging. 
                                                                              Larry Kardish (MOMA, FilmColumbia)
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Don Barry: A Quixotic Exploration – written, directed, and produced by Paul Smart – is unlike any other film. On one level, it’s a documentary about Barry Gerson, avant-garde filmmaker and longtime Hudson Valley resident. It’s also a fantasy in which Gerson impersonates Cervantes’ tragic hero, Don Quixote. In the role of his faithful sidekick, Sancho Panza, is a beguiling Mexican physicist, Genda Monter, in her screen debut. Text from Don Quixote, Volume 2, is recited. The film is also a love letter to Guanajuato, the bohemian college town in Mexico where Smart has lived the last four years. Don Barry ends with a dreamy animation sequence created by Monter.  Smart is a music connoisseur, so the soundtrack of Don Barry, featuring cumbia, a type of contagious Mexican disco music, is impeccable. Segments of Barry Gerson’s minimalist near-abstract films, paired with jumped-up songs in Spanish, suggest a flaming new pan-American renaissance. Don Barry wrestles with artistic obsession, fractured reality, and the blurry line between performance and life. 
                                                                 Sparrow (Hudson Valley One, numerous books)
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This haunting and surreal film is a luscious and languid delight -- as if watching a sumptuous narrative parade pass by whilst sipping fine mescal at a sidewalk café in small town Mexico. It’s poetry that inspires the viewer to compose their own poems about the poem they just saw and heard and it follows, to some undetermined degree, the life of an experimental film maker and creative raconteur Barry Gerson, who, according to the promo material, is likened to Cervantes’ tragicomic hero Don Quixote, as all artists seem to be. Don Barry is part documentary part fiction dealing with the great themes of love and mortality while tilting at the windmills of living a creative life in the contemporary world. It’s Fellini and David Lynch as narrated by Bukowski (actually Barry Gerson himself.) I thoroughly enjoyed it and recommend, without reservation, that you go see it.
                                                                              Norm Magnusson (RadioFreeRhinecliff)

​I feel like I was watching art being made...actively...not art that had been made and packaged. That dynamic is what made it so powerful and pleasing. Thank you!!
                                                                                                                Kalia Donor, author
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Your film is one of those rare things I have spent my life seeking, and then treasure and share with others like a sacrament. It's hard for me to describe exactly what makes an artwork this kind of special thing, but what's coming to mind right now is: it's as if it's been laced with a mild but complete psychedelic, the effects of which are gentle and continue to unfold for (at least) 36 hours after ingested. The questions being grappled with in the film are my questions. The struggle to communicate higher experiences to younger minds. Or even just to others. To the future. How to live in such a way that the exploration can continue as uninterrupted as possible. How to make everyday magic... While the movie narrative was doing it's thing, I felt like there was another story happening underneath, the story of everything that went into it's making, which is to say, the lives that had to be led in precisely the way they had for everything to end up where it has. I guess I am just impressed by the miracle of general life, and your film seems to be filled up to the brim with those impressions. 
                                                             David Perry (Creative Director, Luminary Media)
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What a film you have created! My whole soul is trembling before it. Were you listening in as Carlos Fuentes and I talked about the making of novels from the University of Pennsylvania to Princeton to Harvard to Mexico? Your film vision story takes me back to that moment when I was closest to his genius, and the message stretches that genius to now, to right now.  Your vision is so powerful, uplifting, even in the face of death. I need to rest from the impact of this film... It is positively Joycean!
                                                  Carolivia Heron (RadioTakoma and Howard University)​
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​We would like to take this moment to recognize your film for your vision and the film's unique contribution to cinema. 
                                                                                                               Experimental Forum
 
Your film has the strength of a debut work, an explosion of many concepts, experimentation, documentary, fiction, video art, etc. You say you are 67 years old, but it could have been made by a young person; it's great to see that it's never too late to start.
                                                         Ruggiero Cilli, SamhainBaucogna Int’l Film Festival
 
Experimental filmmaker Barry Gerson tilts at windmills in this docu-fictional tribute, Don Barry, by director Paul Smart, which casts Gerson as a modern-day Don Quixote wandering through Guanajuato, Mexico—equal parts madman, mystic, and metatext. Don Barry wrestles with artistic obsession, fractured reality, and the blurry line between performance and life.
                                                                             Brian Mahoney (Chronogram Magazine)

Overlook is, from one angle, a pretty high-minded, hero’s-journey myth of underworld passage, return, and redemption, sourced from traditions as various as evangelical Christianity and Dante, Jungian archetypes, Kerouac, Arthurian legend, Classical mythology, and what can only be called a pop, rock, and blues theology playing continuously (on car radio and eight-track) in the novel’s background. From another angle, Overlook is a teeming Beatnik litany of all that is rent: acutely observed rust, grime, clutter, spoiled wood, lived-in car interiors, abandoned communities, broken people, and a studious taxonomy of states of defeat and intoxication. Page to page, Overlook combines pan-theological spiritual musing and a debased, journalistic grit not just in equal measure but in some kind of metaphysical equation.
                                                                                       John Burdick (Hudson Valley One)
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Within an evocative setting, Overlook: A Rock & Roll Fable explores the what-ifs of the late great Canadian musician Richard Manuel of The Band and his encounters with the mythical characters of Woodstock, New York—as only former upstate New Yorker and journalist Paul Smart can conjure. You'll be drawn in while longing to retrace their steps yourself.
                        Holly George-Warren (Rolling Stone Books; Janis: Her Life and Music)
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​With Different Eyes is a heart-stabbing book collaboration by the writer Paul Smart and the artist Richard Kroehling. In a sense, it is simply a memoir, a memoir about a man and his family during the COVID pandemic. But it's a lot more than that: a realist writer holds a mirror up to society to show us plainly what's actually there; Smart holds a mirror up to himself, then smashes it, and from the shards has composed a tightly written prose poem. His paragraphs sometimes make fleeting narratives, sometimes they are memories from decades ago, sometimes they're meditative explorations of self or family. "I try to stare mortality down," Smart writes. The book is not only about death—it's about seeing the world with different eyes. This isn't a morose or depressing work, and neither is it sentimental. This book is a gift.
                                                                           Eugene Mirabelli (Heavy Feather Review)
 
An emotionally honest book about some of the fears we all went through during the early months of the Covid Pandemic in 2020. Kroehling's dramatic visuals are interspersed throughout the blog-like entries of Smart, who writes short vignettes about his parents, his brother, his son and his fears of what our country and the world was going through. The book is a powerful reminder of those early days when we all felt such insecurity about what was going to happen next. There's a poetic quality to it that I found calming.​
                                                                                              Jack Rightmyer (Times Union)

We all have our Covid stories, but Smart has aimed for and achieved something more lasting and profound. His prose in With Different Eyes shows a poet's mastery at distilling life's passages into words that resonate with wisdom. This book reads like a timeless consideration of deep truths.
                                                                                            Will Nixon (Hudson Valley One)
 
While struggling to grasp the immense and lurking prevalence of death and abrupt changes, Smart pens each pithy page like a diary entry, giving an aching window into daily life. From the first trip to the emergency room to watching his son spend formative years inside without his friends, the stories hit uncomfortably close to home. With Different Eyes is a time capsule for the cascade of uncomfortable emotions triggered by the pandemic.
                                                                                       Anne Pyburn Craig (Chronogram)
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​Barney Hoskyn's book Small Town Talk is very good but this one, Rock & Woodstock, preceded it and gives you a real insight into Woodstock from someone who knew and was there. It's a paperback and an unknown book. It was recommended to me from someone there and it is well worth a read.
                                                                                             Jerry Tenenbaum (GoodReads)
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​Rock & Woodstock is a well written, very interesting history of the town of Woodstock and the rock stars who made music there. I highly recommend this for anyone who has interest in the history of music from that genre and era. Recommended!
                                                                                          Robert Kadar (Amazon Reviews)