Parents' Guide to The Truffle Hunters

This excellent, beautifully crafted documentary is by turns charming and revelatory as it depicts the unchanging lives of truffle hunters and the cutthroat tactics of the high-stakes truffle market. The Truffle Hunters begins quietly, with no narration, showing dogs and hunters going about their work, with particular attention paid to the hunters' love and appreciation for their highly trained dogs. We never even learn the men's names, save for the 80-something Carlo, whose wife frequently hollers his name, urging him to come home.

But the movie quickly casts doubt on this apparently idyllic life by revealing the information that poison traps are sometimes laid out for dogs, to hurt the competition. The scenes of sellers and other businesspeople who are profiting off of the rare food items also offer a sharp contrast to the pastoral moments. One exhausted seller claims that he never even has time to cook a meal and eat any truffle himself. These cleverly edited, criss-crossing images seem randomly interwoven, but there's a deliberate rhythm that creates a definite emotional flow, seeing the genuinely moving moments hand-in-hand with, yet refreshingly separate from, the cynical ones. Aside from a few moments of iffy content, The Truffle Hunters emerges as a remarkable documentary, one that has a chance to stand the test of time.