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100One of the best, most karmically satisfying comedies of the year, much to the chagrin of the people who are in it.
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100That rarest of art documentaries, one that actually leaves viewers with a better sense of the gifted versus the phony.
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100An exhilarating hall-of-mirrors look at what happens when global art fame turns anonymous, artists become objects, fans turn into artists, and the whole what's-sincere-and-what's-a-sham spectacle is more fun than art was ever supposed to be.
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100Subversive, provocative and unexpected, Exit Through the Gift Shop delights in taking you by surprise, starting quietly but ending up in a hall of mirrors as unsettling as anything Lewis Carroll's Alice ever experienced.
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91A documentary that doubles as a comic thriller, and it’s as entertaining as it is thought-provoking.
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91Whatever it is, Exit Through the Gift Shop is an original.
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Hugely entertaining documentary challenges conventional concepts of legitimate art and the creative process.
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90A sparkling documentary in which we can't trust that anything in it is true. And yet you would never call it a hoax.
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90Exit could be a new subgenre: the prankumentary. Audiences, however, would be advised simply to enjoy the film on its face -- even if that face is a carefully contrived mask.
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90Some have suggested that the whole story, including the emergence of Mr. Brainwash, is an elaborate hoax engineered by Banksy to satirize the commodification of art. If so, it’s a brilliant one.
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89It’s endlessly arguable and open for debate. At the very least, we can all agree that Banksy has found a new wall on which to plaster his art – that of the silver screen.
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88The widespread speculation that Exit Through the Gift Shop is a hoax only adds to its fascination.
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88The brilliantly untrustworthy documentary Exit Through the Gift Shop reminds us that a film can start out in one direction and then change course so radically, it becomes an act of provocation unto itself.
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88What makes Exit Through the Gift Shop so fascinating -- and it is riveting, regardless of your interest in the art world -- is the eloquent way in which it illustrates how beauty and meaning really are in the eye of the beholder and how that eternal phrase still holds true: There's a sucker born every minute.
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88A beguiling and subversively funny entertainment that considers art's worth from many angles, including that of guerrilla painters, gallerists, and seasoned collectors.
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88For a public that's been bullied by the tastemakers, the mystery is a gift. Once we exit this fun house, the only giant left to obey is ourselves.
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83A diverting, playful and puzzling documentary.
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80Along the way, the movie documents a movement while deftly skewering a cynical media and ever-gullible public. So whether we're being had or just enlightened, Banksy's definitely found a new medium in which to create his own works of art.
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80The British street artist's hilarious documentary is a head-spinning, wild ride.
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80Narrated by Rhys Ifans with the dryness of a dessicated toad, Exit Through the Gift Shop is both an exhilarating testament to serendipity and an appalling testament to art-world inanity.
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Not just the definitive portrait of street-art counterculture, but also a hilarious exposé on the gullibility of the masses who embrace manufactured creative personas.
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80A raucously entertaining postmodern survey of guerrilla street art that appears to be one thing, only to fold back on itself and examine would-be filmmaker Thierry Guetta instead.
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80This faux-documentary is droll, aerosol-thin and ultrameta.
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75The line between making guerrilla art and selling out has never blurred more provocatively.
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75It's mainly about a supremely annoying French-born LA clothier who became a hugely successful artist without pausing to consider his utter lack of originality or talent.
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A fascinating and entertaining glimpse into the world of high-level and socially conscious graffiti artists?
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50As a study in prankhood, this Banksy film can’t touch “F for Fake,” Orson Welles’s 1974 movie about an art forger. Welles both conspired with his untrustworthy subject and held him at arm’s length, like a conjurer with his rabbit, and you came out dazzled by the sleight, whereas Exit Through the Gift Shop feels dangerously close to the promotion of a cult--almost, dare one say it, of a brand.