Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan

Rolling Stone Peter Travers

You won't know what outrageous fun is until you see Borat. High-five!

Empire Dan Jolin

Absurd, outrageous, gross, disturbing, insightful, and so funny it’ll burst half the blood vessels in your face.

Chicago Tribune Michael Phillips

Borat is a rarity: a comedy whose middle name is danger, or as the Kazakhs say, kauwip-kater.

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.

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.

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.

Chicago Reader J.R. Jones

As clever as he is crude, Cohen alchemizes bad-taste comedy into Strangelovean satire.

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.

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.

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.

Baltimore Sun Michael Sragow

Borat is a terrific, risky comic creation: a village idiot for the global village.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Entertainment Weekly Owen Gleiberman

When Baron Cohen works without a net, he flies.

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.

Variety Leslie Felperin

Uproariously funny mockumentary.

The New York Times Manohla Dargis

The brilliance of Borat is that its comedy is as pitiless as its social satire, and as brainy.

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.

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).

USA Today Claudia Puig

Borat is most gloriously funny moving picture for to make people see their stupidness.

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.

Philadelphia Inquirer Steven Rea

Baron Cohen brings scary conviction to the performance.

Portland Oregonian Shawn Levy

As slapstick, as satire, as sheer gut-busting comedy, Borat is top notch.

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.

The New Yorker Anthony Lane

It is equipped, like an F-15 Eagle, to engage multiple targets at once.

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.

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.

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.

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.

TV Guide Maitland McDonagh

It's a fearless performance and yields some squirm-inducingly funny moments.

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.

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.

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.

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.