Nixon Reviews
As wayward and self-regarding as its subject, the film long overstays its welcome.
What it finally adds up to is a huge mixed bag of waxworks and daring, a film that is furiously ambitious even when it goes flat, and startling even when it settles for eerie, movie-of-the-week mimicry.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3.5/5
Without question, Nixon dwarfs everything in the American cinema since Schindler's List.
Nixon starts, like a horror movie, on a dark and stormy night, with the president prowling around a room of the White House like Dracula in his lair.
Nixon far overstays its welcome with an increasingly tedious final hour devoted largely to slogging through the minutiae of Watergate.
Factual or not, there's no denying that Nixon has moments when it is nothing short of compelling.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/4
There's no compelling structure or viewpoint to hold the picture together.
Thoughts of Hamlet, Macbeth and King Lear come to mind; here, again, is a ruler destroyed by his fatal flaws. There's something almost majestic about the process: As Nixon goes down in this film, there is no gloating, but a watery sigh, as of a great ship
Full Review
| Original Score: 4/4
Thoughtful, well-researched and carefully modulated, the film also marks director Oliver Stone's coming of age.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/4
Casting Anthony Hopkins was a stroke of unexpected genius.
Stone's no Shakespeare, and neither are his screenwriters.
Joan Allen goes beyond her chilling physical resemblance to Pat Nixon toward serious Oscar worthiness.
| Original Score: 3/4
I never felt that I was seeing the darkness reaching out to the darkness as Nixon was once described.
Real life, if it's real Nixon, is more dramatic than an Oliver Stone movie.
Entertainment Weekly
Top CriticIt's overwhelming to see the many sides of Richard Nixon brought together with this kind of epic force. More than just biography, Nixon is a dizzying and cathartic spectacle -- a free fall through 50 years of American political imagination.
Full Review
| Original Score: A
