Frost/Nixon Reviews

Does director Ron Howard's TV background make him assume that everything has to be repeated, just in case someone was in the kitchen making a sandwich the first time?

Full Review | Original Score: 3/5

Howard can't, as someone mentions in the film, distinguish between a performer and a journalist

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This is the irony of Frost/Nixon: Though it chronicles the moment when (in theory) the 37th president of the United States was cut down to size, the movie's presentation of him is utterly larger than life.

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In terms of condescending narrative handholding, Frost/Nixon has no 2008 rival.

Full Review | Original Score: C

I've seen one too many movies about the disgraced president to find the material compelling.

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Frost/Nixon is a trivial afterword to a historical footnote, a showbiz story inflated into a retroactive therapy session for one of 20th-century America's biggest knaves.

Full Review | Original Score: 1.5/4

Too many words and no drama, unless effeminate Italian shoes is a metaphor for an unloved, bitter man.

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One feels nagged all the way by its self-proclaimed momentousness.

Full Review | Original Score: 2/5

Despite a moving, canny incarnation of the man by Frank Langella, despite a slickly entertaining coffee-table production as only Ron Howard knows how, the movie feels cooked up. In the name of dramatizing history, Frost/Nixon sacrifices it.

Full Review | Original Score: 2.5/4

Sometimes I worry that Ron Howard actually listens to every dumb 18-year-old drunk kid who tells him how to edit his movies

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History is made by the people who write it, not the people who actually do the deeds, and this film is a prime example.

Full Review | Original Score: 5/10

Its boxing metaphor plays out in such mind-numbingly literal terms, there might as well have been a woman in a bikini announcing the beginning of each day's interview.

The movie transforms the wily Nixon into a sympathetic figure -- a familiarly 'complicated' movie character, and hardly one of the darkest and most fascinating souls in 20th century America.

Full Review | Original Score: 2.5/4

For a film that should have been smart and fun, Frost/Nixon turns out to be a stodgy romance to the concept of "heroic" modern journalism.

Full Review | Original Score: 2.5/5

Frost/Nixon is unsatisfying even if, like me, you're a lifelong aficionado of Nixon-bashing.

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Despite the great care and research that went into the movie, Frost/Nixon pales in comparison to Oliver Stone's Nixon when it comes to humanizing the infamous leader.

| Original Score: 2/4

Despite a cavalcade of talent, Frost/Nixon is a middling thing.

Full Review | Original Score: 2/4

I found myself disconcerted and underwhelmed by a hugely anticipated movie. It never quite escapes its stage origins, and under a glitzy surface of period stylings doesn't seem to have much to say.

Full Review | Original Score: 2/5

Full Review | Original Score: 8/10

It could have been so easy for the performance to turn into a caricature, but Langella creates his own version of Nixon and the end result is nothing short of mesmerizing.

Full Review | Original Score: 4.5/5

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