Chicago 10 Reviews
Top Critic
East Bay Express
Chicago 10 is definitely worth a look for skeptics young and old.
DCist
It may be most effective for audiences who do need a spoonful of sugar to make the historical medicine go down.
Full Review
| Original Score: 6/10
Film-Forward.com
Revisits 1968 as a court room drama, through a fresh cinematic look to avoid period clichés while broadening history's appeal to both boomers and their children.
Full Review
| Original Score: 7/10
San Diego Metropolitan
Chicago 10 isn't perfect, but is required viewing for anyone who wasn't around at the time, if only as a reminder of the effectiveness of citizen action.
Playback:stl
Morgan is more interested in recreating the confusing experience of living through those times than in evaluating them in a perspective informed by 40 years of hindsight.
Full Review
| Original Score: 7/10
Bryant Frazer's Deep Focus
The ultimate lesson? Sometimes you make a noble point by acting like a jackass.
Full Review
| Original Score: B
NewsBlaze
Director Brett Morgen earns high marks for finding a most innovative way to illustrate a regrettable chapter in American history.
Movie Metropolis
...despite its storytelling creativity, it doesn't generate as much inspiration or excitement as I would have expected.
Full Review
| Original Score: 6/10
DVDTalk.com
Chicago 10 is an art-house rarity that manages to visually dazzle while peeling away the layers of this contentious moment in time, giving viewers an eyeful of social unrest and wondrous screen fantasia.
Full Review
| Original Score: A-
Chicago 10 is that nearly perfect marriage of style -- edgy, different -- to documentary subject: 1968, that seminal year so celebrated in 2008 for changing the America that came after it.
Full Review
| Original Score: 4/5
Paste Magazine
Short on nuance but long on passion, Chicago 10 recreates the gradual boil-over from peaceful gathering to chaos by augmenting ample, close-range footage with the kind of sonic boom that seldom accompanies political documentaries.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/5
Arizona Daily Star
Indirectly scolds today's meek populace for letting its war-minded government rage unchecked.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3.5/4
San Antonio Express-News
Chicago 10 brandishes enough sickening reality (Chicago police clubbing protestors, etc.) to make the audience gasp with astonishment.
| Original Score: 3/4
Salt Lake Tribune
The Chicago riots may have been our parents' history, but this is not our parents' documentary.
| Original Score: 3.5/4
Deseret News, Salt Lake City
Despite the number in its title, this odd but sometimes entertaining documentary/docudrama hybrid looks at seven defendants who were accused of organizing the protests and orchestrating the resulting mayhem.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2.5/4
Austin American-Statesman
Filmmaker Brett Morgen returns with another livelier-than-usual entry in the nonfiction field, a portrait of '60s activism that mixes vintage footage with cartoon-animated re-enactments.
Full Review
| Original Score: 4/5
Austin Chronicle
A documentary that somehow manages to capture the anarchic spirit of those topsy-turvy times without devolving into anarchy itself.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/5
St. Louis Post-Dispatch
Makes skillful use of documentary footage to relate what happened in the streets of Chicago, culminating in what was routinely described at the time as 'a police riot.'
Full Review
| Original Score: B
