Bumblebee
Mary Poppins Returns
Halloween
Outlander
Log in with Facebook
OR
By creating an account, you agree to the Privacy Policy and the Terms and Policies, and to receive email from Rotten Tomatoes and Fandango.
Please enter your email address and we will email you a new password.
Critics Consensus: American Dharma offers a fascinating glimpse of a political influencer's public persona - and a frustrating missed opportunity to interrogate his actions and stated beliefs.
Critic Consensus: American Dharma offers a fascinating glimpse of a political influencer's public persona - and a frustrating missed opportunity to interrogate his actions and stated beliefs.
All Critics (27) | Top Critics (5) | Fresh (16) | Rotten (11)
"American Dharma" succeeds neither as journalism nor as portraiture, neither as political critique nor as cultural survey nor as psychological study.
The camera stays on Bannon, and what we see is a man who reveals himself even as he thinks he's gaining the upper hand.
American Dharma doesn't just recap a dark chapter in the nation's history. It sounds the alarm for the rest of the world.
Though stylistically quite different from the director's The Fog of War: Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert S. McNamara, it shows the same ability to engage the viewer in American politics through a strategy of detached passion.
On the rare occasions when Morris gets around to challenging Bannon (once every 20 minutes or so), Bannon ducks the question, and that's that.
Though many would argue that Morris' approach to reckoning with the right by giving Bannon an outlet to spread his rhetoric is a misguided mistake, I see it as an opportunity to try to understand one's enemy as a means of self-defense.
I do not have quite so negative a view of [the] film-I thought it aestheticized the information flow of the digital era in interesting ways, and that it gave me a greater understanding of how Bannon thinks and thus a clearer idea of how to subvert him...
If anything, we should be thanking Errol Morris, who sat across from Stephen Bannon for days on end listening to his stories - so we didn't have to.
The most frustrating part of "American Dharma" is that Morris lets Bannon off too easily. When he critiques him, Bannon either doesn't respond or ducks the questions.
Morris does a terrific job deconstructing how the past determines our present and future. Unfortunately, his thesis is also wrapped up in a profile of Steve Bannon.
I suggest anyone and everyone see American Dharma to know precisely what kind of saboteurs our country is up against.
Morris finds himself negotiating the finer points of a deal with the proverbial Devil. Bannon courts the credibility afforded subjects of Morris' Oscar winning lens, but he has little intention of inviting the filmmaker's full scrutiny.
There are no featured reviews for American Dharma at this time.
There are no approved quotes yet for this movie.
View All