All Critics (104)
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Top Critics (26)
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Fresh (102)
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DVD (4)
The "Emperor's New Clothes" con job of modern art takes one right on the kisser in Exit Through the Gift Shop, a little guerrilla style filmmaking about guerrilla graffiti artists and their status as darlings of the art world.
The plain fact is that, on some level, it doesn't matter whether the film is true or not. Either way, it's fascinating. Either way, we learn a lot. Either way, it's a great film.
Hoax or not, Exit Through the Gift Shop ends up energizing, aggravating, enjoyable and revealing. Is it art or isn't it? Who knows? Apparently no one.
Put-on, satire, mockumentary, goof? Whatever it is, "Exit Through the Gift Shop" is an original.
Like Banksy's best street work, it pushes and prods our gullibility buttons and sends the mind swirling with questions of artistic authenticity and intent.
Exit Through the Gift Shop offers an absorbing glimpse of a bracingly subversive slice of the culture, as well as some tantalizing images of Banksy at work.
An irritatingly misguided and pointless piece of work...
Too ironic by half, this film is hobbled most of all by principal Thierry Guetta, that I find insufferably banal. As a satire on a market-driven art world, it is fairly toothless. Why it has garnered rave reviews is the biggest puzzle of all.
Energetic, exciting, entertaining, and at times illegal, Exit Through The Gift Shop is a wicked treat.
Those tricky questions that lie in the chasm between art and commerce are raised naturally through the progression of the narrative, whether that narrative is partially fabricated or not.
Curious docu about street artists with some strong language.
Since virtually anything can be considered art, the term has become virtually meaningless. This documentary proves it.
The behind-the-scenes insight into the techniques of illegal street art is fascinating, as is the art-market critique..
Illustrates how our insistence and abilities in judging and evaluating art are often arbitrary, contradictory, and idiotic.
It's funny, playful, and intriguing in a way that makes me want to see it again.
A cinematic treatise on the vagaries of authorship, trends, and the art world itself, Exit Through the Gift Shop is funny and thought-provoking where most documentaries present themselves as trustworthy and invariably factual.
After all those debates about the meaning of art ... [who] would have thought that the best and most incisive comments on the argument would have come from street-punk Banksy?
Regardless of its motives, Gift Shop is a superb work, one that demands the audience ask questions that don't always go down easily...
A strange oxymoron of a film, like a straight-faced Spinal Tap or a Man On Wire for liars.
The street artist known as Banksy is witty, he's smart, he's subversive -- and he's compelling. So it stands to reason that the street-art doc he ostensibly hijacked would be all those things, too.
Confused yet? Good. Banksy probably wants you exactly that way.
A provocative and absorbing exploration of what constitutes art, the creative process and the power of hype to triumph over talent.
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