- Critic Score
- Most active
- Publication
- Most clicked
-
100Bukowski is one of my all time favorite writers and now I have an all new respect for the man thanks to John Dullaghan’s phenomenal film. I’ll be breaking out “Post Office,” “Ham On Rye,” and “Notes of a Dirty Old Man” again very soon.
-
100It reveals Bukowski to be a far grander artist than his bum's armor would suggest.
-
Often-brilliant, often-reverent documentary deconstructs Bukowski's bad-boy literary persona, finds a fascinatingly messed-up guy behind the words.
-
90Charles Bukowski, the bard of post-war L.A.'s working-class underbelly, was no ordinary cult writer, and John Dullaghan's thorough, compelling doc Bukowski: Born Into This does a credible job of showing why.
-
90A portrait of a sometimes surly, often foulmouthed, always brilliant artist that is at once humane, horrific, hilarious and deeply moving.
-
90About as good a picture of a writer's real life as we are likely to get. It is wide-ranging, it is fair, it is thorough, and although it admires, it is also tough enough to condemn.
-
89The bulk, the heft, and the girth of Bukowski: Born Into This arrives in the form of the author himself, giving beery readings to Berkeley audiences clearly enjoying a contact high or sitting, ill-kempt but quiet, pensive, Heineken in one yellowy paw, in his apartment.
-
88How much was legend, how much was pose, how much was real? I think it was all real, and the documentary suggests as much.
-
88Wants to claim Bukowski (1920-1994) as a 20th-century West Coast Walt Whitman -- a people's poet of modern degradation. Through a selective presentation of his writing and a reverently crass treatment of his life, it makes a funny, often intensely moving case, and you're having such a good time that you're glad to let it.
-
80A remarkable movie, because, like "Crumb" or even "American Splendor," it adores the very people most of us might ignore if they passed us on the street. It's a love letter to someone who desperately needs one, even 10 years after his death.
-
80Definitive and engrossing documentary.
-
80Makes a compelling case for raising him (Bukowski) from cult status to the top rank of 20th century U.S. literary figures -- while providing ample evidence of a very colorful life and times.
-
80This documentary profile of poet and novelist Charles Bukowski exploits the writer's counterculture persona but also works to dispel it, revealing a gifted and extremely complicated man.
-
Raw and defining documentary about the man--and the myth.
-
75Excerpts from Schroeder's long video documentary about him, and from the flawed melodrama "Barfly" they made together, add more variety.
-
75He's not someone you may wish you'd known, but he's a fascinating street character.
-
75The dirty old man who became a cult poet and author was a true original, and every minute he's on screen, whether it's reading from his brutally honest work or musing on a hard-lived life for the cameras, it's hard to look away.
-
It's the portrait of an artist who had neither time nor respect for literary niceties -- he was, in the words of publisher John Martin, a "man of the street writing for the man of the street."
-
Some of the most affecting moments in the film show Bukowski walking the streets of his Los Angeles, a barren suburban hell, as he reads his poems and the words appear on and then fade from the screen.
-
70Accomplishes beautifully what it sets out to do, which is to reveal the man behind the crusty, hard-drinking, tough-talking persona Charles Bukowski so artfully crafted.
-
63Dullaghan's film is a bit too straightforward and introductory to be declared a definitive portraiture. The gold nuggets worth sifting for lie in the anecdotal minutiae.
-
60By turns profane, vulgar, unpredictable, scabrous and perpetually somewhere between buzzed and three sheets to the wind, Bukowski opened a window onto a fringe world of blue-collar drudgery and alcoholic self-obliteration with his blistering, bleakly comic dispatches from the gutter.
-
Despite the fact there's no lack of raw material, Bukowski fails to place its subject's actions and statements in any psychological or literary context. It's simply a celebration of Bukowski's misogyny and self-abuse.
-
50As factoids do-si-do with testimonials from the likes of drinking buddy Sean Penn and fan-boy Bono, the movie all but becomes the very A&E Hagiography for which Bukowski would have had little or no patience.
-
50Goes to great lengths to show the man-child behind the barfly, but in its rush to deify its subject, it lacks critical voices and context.
prev
next
Page:
- 1
User score distribution:
-
Positive: 9 out of 10
-
Mixed: 0 out of 10
-
Negative: 1 out of 10
-
Johana9Great documentary. shows how Bukowski was a raw and unfiltered writer.
-
JasonJ10
-
[Anonymous]8