- Studio: Lions Gate Films
- Release Date: Dec 29, 1999
- Critic Score
- Most active
- Publication
- Most clicked
-
100More reverie and meditation than reportage.
-
100Morris's unique blend of realism and surrealism gives the film great resonance as a portrait of one eccentric individual and, more important, a study of the morbid proclivities that run beneath the surface of our supposedly civilized society.
-
100Fred Leuchter is just one deluded figure, but by the end of this great and chilling sick-joke documentary he stands as a living icon of the banality of evil.
-
90What's fascinating about Morris's riveting portrait is the notion that monsters can be born not just out of overwhelming evil, but pure egotism and stupidity -- much more mundane, yet still dangerous.
-
90Using archly staged interviews and reconstructions that draw attention to the components of the documentary form, Morris does justice to the complexity of hot-button issues by suggesting several layers of subtext at once, portraying the articulate Leuchter as both rational and prone to rationalize.
-
89Seems more like a subtle, elegiac tone poem than an indictment of human banality and the evil that men do.
-
88Brings the viewer up close and personal with the face of evil.
-
88Morris' most gripping film since "The Thin Blue Line," is the year's scariest movie.
-
88Segues from the merely quirky into the bizarrely unthinkable.
-
88With his coolly objective moon's-eye view serving a story that's bizarre by even his long-established career standards, the great documentarian Errol Morris examines the perils of vanity - though others will understandably make more sinister interpretations.
-
81Lacks scope and doesn't resonate grandly as a portrait of an American underbelly like Morris' earlier works do. But it still packs a wallop.
-
80Errol Morris' characteristically distanced documentary is empathetic without being especially sympathetic.
-
80Morris seduces us into stepping into Leuchter's world of delusion and ego.
-
80Morris, instead of evoking the solemnity that surrounds most films that touch on the Holocaust, has directed Mr. Death as the blackest of comedies.
-
80The fascinating film equivalent of a humane execution.
-
80Extraordinary documentary.
-
75(Morris's) strangest and most disturbing portrait yet.
-
70A strange piece of work, perhaps closer to an imaginative portrait or an experimental fiction that borrows elements from real life than a traditional documentary.
-
70Leuchter is such a riveting, disturbing and finally pathetic character that his story hardly needs embellishing with Morris' fancy visuals and ominous mood music.
-
70(Morris) sees Leuchter's story as more personal, more about one individual's self-absorption and folly, than an indictment of a particular system.
-
70Mr. Death, which is shot through with one dark absurdity after another, emerges as a cautionary tale if ever there was one.
-
70At the heart of all Morris's films -- from "The Thin Blue Line" to "Fast, Cheap, and Out of Control" -- is a fundamental belief in the unreliability of truth.
-
60Morris, who more or less invented the ironic documentary, seems to struggle here for an appropriate tone even as he allows Leuchter more than enough rope to hang himself.
-
50An affecting film, but it just may not be everyone's cup of cyanide.
-
50The director's beautiful detachment suggests a kind of cowardice.
prev
next
Page:
- 1
User score distribution:
-
Positive: 2 out of 2
-
Mixed: 0 out of 2
-
Negative: 0 out of 2
-
Lionel10