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Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan
EMAILPRINTTwentieth Century-Fox Film Corporation

Universal acclaim
Based on 38 critic reviews
How did we calculate this?
Based on 710 votes
Read user comments
Rate this movie >
Movie Info
Genre(s): Comedy
Written by:
Sacha Baron Cohen (also story),
Anthony Hines (also story), Peter Baynham (also story),
Dan Mazer,
Todd Phillips (story)
Directed by: Larry Charles
Release Date:
Theatrical: November 3, 2006
DVD: March 6, 2007
Running Time: 82 minutes, Color
Origin: USA
Summary
RATING: R for pervasive strong crude and sexual content including graphic nudity, and language
Starring Sacha Baron Cohen, Pamela Anderson, Ken Davitian, Pat Haggerty, and Alan Keyes
The movie film is a government assigned project to broaden and enlight people and glory of nation. Cultural learning is emportant to follow on global basis. We make our nation a better and more convenient place for house and living. Kazakhs are progressive and asstonishing people that with conclusion of project will have new optimistic approach in daily life in world of same people. Our film will bring the US & A closer to us. We help with needs of kazakh knowledge and Us&a culture is positive step for future of our glorious nation. (20th Century Fox)
Also On Metacritic
FILM: Masked & Anonymous
Also On The Web: Internet Movie Database View The Trailer Official Studio Site Official Borat Site
What The Critics Said
All critic scores are converted to a 100-point scale. If a critic does not indicate a score, we assign a score based on the general impression given by the text of the review. Learn more...
Rolling Stone Peter Travers
You won't know what outrageous fun is until you see Borat. High-five!
Read Full Review >Empire Dan Jolin
Absurd, outrageous, gross, disturbing, insightful, and so funny it’ll burst half the blood vessels in your face.
Read Full Review >Chicago Tribune Michael Phillips
Borat is a rarity: a comedy whose middle name is danger, or as the Kazakhs say, kauwip-kater.
Read Full Review >Washington Post Ann Hornaday
The result is a perfect combination of slapstick and satire, a Platonic ideal of high-and lowbrow that manages to appeal to our basest common denominators while brilliantly skewering racism, anti-Semitism, sexism and that peculiarly American affliction: we're-number-one-ism.
Read Full Review >Slate Dana Stevens
Wildly funny. Its best jokes approach some savage, atavistic core of cultural taboo and make the viewer wonder: Is it really possible to laugh at this? But by the time you formulate that question, it's too late: You're already laughing.
Read Full Review >Film Threat Pete Vonder Haar
Borat isn't just one of the funniest movies of the year, it might be one of the funniest movies of all time.
Read Full Review >Chicago Reader J.R. Jones
As clever as he is crude, Cohen alchemizes bad-taste comedy into Strangelovean satire.
Read Full Review >New York Post Lou Lumenick
I can't wait to see Borat, which has twice as many laughs as all of this year's other movie comedies combined, for a fourth time.
Read Full Review >Christian Science Monitor Peter Rainer
I hate to sound blurby, but Borat is the funniest comedy I've seen since I don't know when.
Read Full Review >New York Daily News Jack Mathews
Though Borat has been likened to "Jackass," there's a huge difference. The "Jackass" movies are about extreme stunts. Borat is about interaction and gullibility, and its success is unique to both Cohen and to this one-time-only movie.
Read Full Review >Baltimore Sun Michael Sragow
Borat is a terrific, risky comic creation: a village idiot for the global village.
Read Full Review >Boston Globe Ty Burr
A comic put-on of awe-inspiring crudity and death-defying satire and by a long shot the funniest film of the year. It is "Jackass" with a brain and Mark Twain with full frontal male nudity.
Read Full Review >San Francisco Chronicle Mick LaSalle
It's screamingly, hysterically, laugh-through-the-next-joke, laugh-for-the-next-week funny. It's so inventive…This is a film by an original and significant comic intelligence.
Read Full Review >Newsweek David Ansen
This is comedy from the danger zone, and it will genuinely offend some folks who feel certain subjects are not to be laughed at. They'd best stay at home. Fans should be warned as well: Borat can make you laugh so hard it hurts.
Read Full Review >Chicago Sun-Times Roger Ebert
Very nice. I like Borat very much. I think it is, as everybody has been saying, the funniest movie in years.
Read Full Review >Entertainment Weekly Owen Gleiberman
When Baron Cohen works without a net, he flies.
Read Full Review >Village Voice J. Hoberman
Indeed, the man who invented Borat is a masterful improviser, brilliant comedian, courageous political satirist, and genuinely experimental film artist. Borat makes you laugh but Baron Cohen forces you to think.
Read Full Review >The New York Times Manohla Dargis
The brilliance of Borat is that its comedy is as pitiless as its social satire, and as brainy.
Read Full Review >Wall Street Journal Joe Morgenstern
Not since the halcyon days of Archie Bunker and "All in the Family" has so sharp a wit punctured so many balloons.
Salon.com Stephanie Zacharek
Borat is an astonishingly entertaining picture, and it's a testament to Cohen's gifts that he can pull off a feat as extravagant and as fully realized as this one is.
Read Full Review >Austin Chronicle Marc Savlov
This feature-length expansion of Cohen's deliciously ridiculous character accomplishes what decades of Soviet propaganda failed to do: It points out and underscores issues of race, religious intolerance, classism, and all manner of very American social ills by giving the culprits just enough rope to hang themselves by their own petards (and then some).
Read Full Review >USA Today Claudia Puig
Borat is most gloriously funny moving picture for to make people see their stupidness.
Read Full Review >Miami Herald Rene Rodriguez
It takes some exceptionally intelligent and witty people to make a dumb comedy this funny and perceptive: Borat may be offensive (to some), infantile, low-brow or even just a stunt, but you won't hate yourself in the morning for loving it.
Read Full Review >Philadelphia Inquirer Steven Rea
Baron Cohen brings scary conviction to the performance.
Read Full Review >Portland Oregonian Shawn Levy
As slapstick, as satire, as sheer gut-busting comedy, Borat is top notch.
Read Full Review >The Onion (A.V. Club) Nathan Rabin
In choosing cheap gags over incisive cultural commentary, Borat scores more as scatology than satire, but it's easy to overlook its ramshackle nature in light of the explosive laughter.
Read Full Review >The New Yorker Anthony Lane
It is equipped, like an F-15 Eagle, to engage multiple targets at once.
Read Full Review >LA Weekly Scott Foundas
The gimmick is simple but devastatingly effective: Never once breaking character or acknowledging that he’s in on the joke, the Jew-fearing, grammatically challenged reporter ingratiates himself with his unsuspecting, average-American victims before uproariously turning the tables on them.
Read Full Review >Los Angeles Times Kenneth Turan
With his corrosive brand of take-no-prisoners humor that scalds on contact, Cohen is the most intentionally provocative comedian since Lenny Bruce and early Richard Pryor, with a difference. For unlike those predecessors, there is a mean-spiritedness, an every-man-for-himself coldness about his humor. The one kind of laughter you won't find in Borat is that which acknowledges shared humanity. Instead, there is that pitiless staple of reality TV, watching others humiliate themselves for our viewing pleasure.
Read Full Review >The Hollywood Reporter Kirk Honeycutt
The weapon wielded by Cohen and Charles is crudeness. People today, especially those in public life, can disguise prejudice in coded language and soft tones. Bigotry is ever so polite now. So the filmmakers mean to drag the beast out into the sunlight of brilliant satire and let everyone see the rotting, stinking, foul thing for what it is. When you laugh at something that is bad, it loses much of its power.
ReelViews James Berardinelli
The variation keeps things fresh and the relatively short running length (less than 90 minutes) ensures that Borat doesn't overstay its welcome - even though when it's all done, we wish this absurd man might have lingered a little longer.
Read Full Review >Premiere Jessica Letkemann
Borat is, in many ways, an heir to the same kind of subversion of American norms that the transvestite Divine perfected in John Waters’ early films.
Read Full Review >TV Guide Maitland McDonagh
It's a fearless performance and yields some squirm-inducingly funny moments.
Read Full Review >Charlotte Observer Lawrence Toppman
Cohen and his gang are smart enough to know when to quit. Like a loud but amusing guest at a dinner party, Borat collects his coat and goes home just as his hosts are starting to fidget.
Read Full Review >The Globe and Mail (Toronto) Rick Groen
Borat at its best is pure satiric genius, the Swiftian kind that has you busting a gut with laughter even while checking your conscience for implicating flaws.
Read Full Review >New York Magazine David Edelstein
Except for a screamingly funny climax in which he attempts to kidnap Pamela Anderson (who reportedly wasn't in on the joke), I found the Borat feature (directed by Larry Charles, who does similar duties on "Curb Your Enthusiasm") depressing; and the paroxysms of the audience reinforced the feeling that I was watching a bearbaiting or pigsticking.
Read Full Review >Seattle Post-Intelligencer William Arnold
The movie itself cannot begin to match its delicious high concept. It's offensively funny in places but it can't sustain itself for a feature length running time and it's not nearly as clever or as fun as it should be.
Read Full Review >What Our Users Said
The average user rating for this movie is 6.9 (out of 10) based on 710 User Votes
Note: User votes are NOT included in the Metascore calculation.
Help U gave it a3:
Want to see a movie that your mommy and the evil government doesn't want you to see? Then prepare to wet your diaper in glee because its Borat. Believe it or not, I actually saw this one with my parents. I remember that day it was at the cheap theatre just in case it sucked and we got our moneys worth $1 but I can never replace the time lost. To start off, the jokes weren't funny and repetitive a bad combination in my book. The running joke is that he is from Kazakhstan and doesn't know much about America which is totally ignorant because... the funny thing is.... people in Kazakhstan know more about America than Americans know about Kazakhstan. Sometimes, it seems that Ali G, pulls down his pants and shits on the culture which is as insensitive as the "American" culture Ali is trying to portray. After the movie I didn't even have to ask my parents what they thought, they straight up said," Maybe if you cut out all of the story you could have put it on a crappy version of SNL, Madtv perhaps, and spared everyone of the story." That was my dad... My mom,"It seems like they put all the best jokes in the commercials, which could have been on MadTv as a fake commercial." And I said,"Ya, the movie based itself on a joke that just sucked." And they both concluded, "Ya, we kinda saw that, we knew it was going to suck, we just wanted to see the movie that was supposed to be revolutionary." ("Ya that movie was pretty forgettable,"... "What movie?" And we all laughed) that part didn't actually happen but it pretty much summed up how we felt. Its actually funny I wasn't going to see the movie until my parents took me because I didn't want to see the movie that spawned, "High Five", "Great Success", and "Very Nice" the phrases I heard everywhere too many times and I didn't think were funny at all. And it seemed like everyone was watching it because it was controversial. Why did I give it a 3? I think that the movie actually tried to make a good joke and completely failed in execution.
Miles B gave it a9:
How anyone can say that this film is not a genre defining if not comedy-REdefining film is unthinkable. By having a character so seemingly oblivious to the boundaries of acceptability laid down by western culture, he expertly exposes the racism and hypocrisy evident in American society. This is a masterpiece of psychological and subversive satire. People who attack this film are narrow minded and ignorant, perhaps not so much offended as they are scared by the revelations of America's metaphorical skeletons in its closet.
Dallin P gave it a10:
Literally the only movie I ever felt was worth buying so I could watch it over and over again. This movie is raunch and hilarious and really does fit its premise of revealing what America is really like.
Luke M. gave it a10:
One of the funniest, if not the funniest movie I have ever seen. Jack P, while the movie is awesome, if you literally bust a gut every time you saw the movie, you would probably die.
David P gave it a0:
This movie is over-hyped garbage. I don't understand how this movie has such a high Metascore and some really good movies have such low ones. The entire Borat Metacritic page is a testament to how unreliable professional critics are at telling a good movie apart from a bad one.
Coco Bunny gave it a5:
High expectations, big letdown. While it has its funny moments, it dragged at times. And dragged. And dragged. Surely Cohen could have come up with more funny stuff--or edited some of the lulls out--to fill the whole running time. If you're a fan of gross-out comedies, you'll like this.
Ash S gave it a9:
I personally find this movie to be an amazingly funny satire on the casual racism and prejudice that seems to make up parts of America, rather then a serious film - and it does this greatly.
