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100It is a spellbinding enigma, and one of the damnedest films Morris has ever made.
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100At 88 minutes, Tabloid is short and sweet (it's pure movie candy), but by the end we've forged an emotional connection to Joyce McKinney at the deep core of her unapologetic fearless/nutty valor. And that's what really makes a great tabloid story: It's a vortex that's also a mirror.
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91McKinney may well be a madwoman, but Morris connects so deeply to her obsessions that the film's tone never seems exploitative or mocking.
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90For much of the movie Morris simply lets the loquacious McKinney talk, and she never, ever stops. And she never disappoints.
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90This story about Joyce McKinney, a one-time beauty queen who found herself not once but twice at the center of outrageous, tabloid-friendly news stories, is another of Morris' alternately hilarious and disturbing inquiries into the slippery nature of truth.
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88There's nothing mean-spirited, or judgmental, about the way Morris goes about his business - he must have been kicking himself with glee as one bizarre strand of the story unravels to reveal the next.
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88McKinney, a woman whose spellbinding and baffling presence - nay, performance - in Tabloid more than lives up to her recent off-screen antics.
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88One of Morris' swiftest works, yet also one of his saddest, Tabloid reveals among other things what happens when one person's definition of ordinary healthy romance is undone by another's.
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83The result is not a major work, but still a wildly funny portrait that succeeds at inducing the incredulity Morris always seeks out.
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80Tabloid is the perfect movie for that night when you can't decide whether to see something low- or highbrow. It's seamlessly and satisfyingly both.
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80The sheer heterogeneity of human experience is one of his (Morris) enduring preoccupations, and he has found, once again, an impossible and perfect embodiment of just how curious our species can be.
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80Morris's trademark device of superimposing giant type over his talking heads - Willing! Manacled Mormon! - often made me wonder if Morris were exposing the world of tabloid journalism or participating in it.
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80Gripping, offensive and bewildering, Tabloid is a mean-spirited masterpiece.
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75"It was a perfect tabloid story," the Brit Peter Tory, who covered it, remembers. "Kinky sex, religion, kidnapping, a beauty queen."
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75There are three sides to most love stories: his, hers and the truth. But on London's Fleet Street, the three sides are his, hers and the tabloids'.
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75The humor - and there's enough of it that Tabloid could be categorized as a comedy - is unforced, arising as it does out of these truth-is-stranger-than-fiction circumstances.
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75Morris is a storyteller of the highest order, and within seconds, he draws us into his subject, doling out details, making us wonder what will happen next and dropping bombs for maximum impact.
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75It's a guaranteed good time at the movies.
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75A slick, entertaining offering, playing at times like a tarted up "E! True Hollywood Story."
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70The joke buried in Tabloid is that this sexual obsessive is very likely not a sexual person at all.
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70It's an amusing enough story, all right, and it adequately fills up Tabloid's 88 minutes - but a minute longer would have been too much.
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70Tabloid spins a heck of a yarn, while implicitly warning viewers not to be so entertained that they believe every gamy detail.
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70Errol Morris's documentary was made, and scheduled for release, long before the News of the World story broke. The smart part is that the film dissects those excesses deftly with a quasitabloid style of its own.
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70Plays like a vacation at a seedy seaside resort. The issue at hand - whether McKinney engaged in criminal behavior with Anderson - is of little moment; what's important is the personality of the lady in question.
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70Absurd as it sounds, Joyce's conviction is not only convincing but contagious. So, too, is her elastic sense of reality - a 90-minute immersion in her world is enough to make you question your own.
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Jul 11, 201170Errol Morris' Tabloid is bonkers in all the best possible ways -- a welcome return to perverse portraiture after a lengthy sojourn in the realm of more serious-minded subjects.
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70Tabloid is candy for voyeurs. We laugh like mad at a nut whose only mistake was being born in the last century, too early to have made real money.
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70Morris clearly invested so much time and energy in McKinney's story because he saw her as emblematic of our crazed times. Others might wonder whether the sad saga deserves quite this much attention, but there's no denying the film's morbid fascination.
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67Lots of people have crazy stuff happen to them once or twice. Some people are magnets for crazy stuff. And then there's Joyce McKinney, who is like a factory where magnets for crazy stuff are made and warehoused.
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60A compelling story told with Morris's usually flair. Still, hard not to think of it as a disappointment by the director's exalted standards and a missed opportunity to explore society's dysfunctional relationship with its media.
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60It's all compelling, in the way reading trashy gossip usually is. But without any new perspectives, what's the point?
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60Unlike a great Morris film such as "Gates of Heaven" or "Mr. Death," where the quirks of character feel connected to a larger, profoundly insightful vision of humanity, Tabloid never gets beyond its idiosyncratic surface.
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50Morris has found a real character in McKinney, but to what end, I couldn't say.
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50The documentary Tabloid shows that an oddball lead character and a smirky style do not necessarily add up to a complete movie.