"So black and white that it can make you forget that color films exist, and so sensually rich that it may make you want to go on a movie diet afterwards, this exquisite chronicling of Andrew Noren's self-confessed activity as a 'light thief' and 'shadow bandit,' mainly within the confines of a small city apartment, is fortunately silent, too. It creates a visual music so concentrated that I'm sure any musical accompaniment would be redundant or, even worse, reductive in effect. "Often evoking the luminous textures of certain European films in the Twenties (like the pulsating light patterns of F.W. Murnau's Faust), as well as the pantheism and 'poetic structuralism' of Louis Hock--with smoke, hair, leafy textures and fabrics treated as delicately as brushstrokes, then mixed together in a sort of light blender that suggests Josef von Sternberg's teasing manner of dissolving his own glittering bric-à-brac--Charmed Particles can lead one off in many possible directions, most of them internal.... If this is formalism, the least that can be said for Noren is that he makes the most of it." Jonathan Rosenbaum (from "Film: The Front Line 1983," to be published this summer by Arden Press)