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100A very funny, sometimes very sad documentary.
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100Smith's gleeful, touching documentary records the agony and the ecstasy of realizing your dream, and intangible ways that such dreams help keep people alive.
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100That's why American Movie cuts so deep: It's about the American dream, about not giving up, about being true to yourself.
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100A revealing, intimate, quirky and generous portrait of nothing less than the American Dream.
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The rare documentary that combines a wildly charismatic subject with an elegant structure...not-to-be-missed.
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100As quintessential a story of American ambition as Welles' own "Citizen Kane."
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100Near-perfect editing, and cleverly poignant dialogue.
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90Extraordinary.
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90This unassuming, insistently entertaining documentary has the virtue of a great subject.
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90Though a little long, the film takes us right inside both the creative impulse and the margins of American life. Its triumph is to show those two things as being deeply, wonderfully connected.
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A revealing, heart- and mind-engaging insight into a uniquely American character type many of us may have known.
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88Of all the many documentaries that take you along on a movie shoot, one of my all-time favorites is this delightfully scrappy, sometimes poignant, often hilarious show.
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88Hysterical-depressing, vividly sobering.
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88This thorough original is a wall-to-wall exercise in gallows humor, a movie whose full funny/sad effect doesn't hit until you reflect upon the subject and the cast of characters.
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83But this is pretty honest and true filmmaking, nonetheless; try as you might, you can't detect the leer of the satirist.
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80Brilliant, mind-boggling.
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80Wildly entertaining and quite poignant.
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80Touching, frequently hilarious.
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80A chronicle of the exasperating circumstances that yield cinema gold -- or lead. It almost doesn't matter which; it's the process that counts here.
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80Hilarious and often moving.
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80Like its subject, American Movie works entirely on its own quirky terms.
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80As I watched American Movie, a lot of it struck me as untranscendent misery. But in hindsight it seems less hopeless.
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80Often coming across as simultaneously out of control and self-possessed, Borchardt can't have been an easy target, but the filmmakers seem to have nailed him.
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75A tacit auteur-to-auteur endorsement of the inalienable right to make movies--regardless of talent or sobriety or adult responsibilities--is what gives American Movie its uneasy kick.
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70Although I don't begrudge Borchardt his year of fame, what he doesn't seem to understand about his exploitation creeps me out.
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70Although overly long at 107 minutes, American Movie is an incisive, largely absorbing work and a far more mature effort than Smith's "American Job."
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63Frequently hilarious, if overlong.
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63It's never entirely clear whether Borchardt is also an object of ridicule for documentarian Chris Smith.
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50It seems more a geek show than a slab of marketing wizardry.
User score distribution:
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Positive: 5 out of 9
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Mixed: 2 out of 9
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Negative: 2 out of 9
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10
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MilwaukeeJoe110
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AdamS.2Made me feel sick inside. Extremely depressing.