| 100 |
Chicago Tribune
This movie, the subject of controversy, is a defiantly personal statement on what the war really is--laced with that now-familiar "Roger and Me" mix of homespun wit, pop culture playfulness, populist heart twisting and "gotcha" guerilla film-making tactics.
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| 100 |
Christian Science Monitor
Moore makes no pretense of being "fair and balanced." He makes a passionate case for his own perspective, and invites us to agree with him or not. "I fulminate, you decide" could be his motto.
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| 100 |
San Francisco Chronicle
Assessing the merits of a political film is a tricky business. Obviously, its quality is partly a function of its power to persuade, but its persuasiveness is in the eye of the beholder.
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| 91 |
Portland Oregonian
Karen Karbo
A savagely partisan indictment of George W. Bush's presidency.
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| 88 |
Chicago Sun-Times
A compelling, persuasive film, at odds with the White House effort to present Bush as a strong leader.
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| 88 |
Rolling Stone
Moore has marshaled what's on the record and off into a stinging indictment of where we're going. In a multiplex filled with Hollywood cotton candy, we need him more than ever.
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| 88 |
USA Today
The documentary's scathing attack on the war in Iraq and George W. Bush's presidency is informative, provocative, frightening, compelling, funny, manipulative and, most of all, entertaining.
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| 83 |
Entertainment Weekly
Scalding and glib, derisive yet impassioned, Fahrenheit 9/11 is an intensely resonant piece of Bush-bashing, because it lets the president do most of the work.
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| 80 |
Empire
Arguably not the most proficiently crafted film in Cannes this year and certainly not the most balanced, but Moore’s assault on the Bush administration is a terrific polemic.
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| 80 |
Film Threat
So maybe the entire right wing should just shut the f--- up, and accept that Michael Moore is going to have his say now.
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| 80 |
Dallas Observer
This would be 10 times the movie if it featured an actual debate between Moore and Bush. Nonetheless, the man makes a remarkably strong case, tastefully inserting himself into the Bush-baiting only when necessary--one such stroke of brilliance involves personally urging congressmen to send their own kids to Iraq.
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| 80 |
Los Angeles Times
Michael Moore in Fahrenheit 9/11 has launched an unapologetic attack, both savage and savvy, on an administration he feels has betrayed the best of America and done extensive damage in the world.
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| 78 |
Austin Chronicle
So great are the charges raised against the Bush administration in the film, and so combustible the current state of geopolitics, that Moore’s film could actually prove to be the first in history to help unseat a sitting American president.
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| 75 |
Philadelphia Inquirer
As a character assassin, Moore fails, because you can't kill anyone with contempt and sarcasm. And as an independent counsel prosecuting Bush for bamboozling America, Moore likewise misses his mark because many of the exhibits he offers as evidence are emotional rather than factual.
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| 75 |
New York Daily News
The information here isn't necessarily new, but it is packaged in an acid-tongued way along with powerhouse visuals that drive home the filmmaker's nakedly political views.
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| 75 |
Boston Globe
One last thought: Fahrenheit 9/11 is many things, but for pity's sake let's not call it a documentary.
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| 75 |
Miami Herald
Unapologetically slanted -- and often hilarious.
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| 70 |
The New York Times
While Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11 will be properly debated on the basis of its factual claims and cinematic techniques, it should first of all be appreciated as a high-spirited and unruly exercise in democratic self-expression.
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| 70 |
Time
Mary Corliss
A brisk and entertaining indictment of the Bush Administration’s middle East policies before and after September 11, 2001.
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| 70 |
Village Voice
If Moore is formidable, it's not because he is a great filmmaker (far from it), but because he infuses his sense of ridicule with the fury of moral indignation. Fahrenheit 9/11 is strongest when that wrath is vented on Bush and his cohorts.
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| 70 |
The New Yorker
Fahrenheit 9/11 offers the thrill of a coherent explanation for everything, but parts of the movie are no better than a wild, lunging grab at a supposed master plan. [28 June 2004, p. 108]
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| 70 |
New York Magazine
More often than not, Moore goes for the guffaw, and as enjoyable as that can be, it falls short of producing the kind of devastating, in-depth analysis that might really challenge the hearts and minds of ALL audiences, left and right. At the very least, this approach undercuts the effectiveness of Moore’s own case.
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| 70 |
Washington Post
A potential cultural juggernaut.
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| 70 |
Chicago Reader
There are plenty of laughs whenever Moore wants to twist the knife, but the bottom line is that he respects and trusts his fellow Americans a lot more than Bush does.
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| 70 |
Salon.com
Fahrenheit 9/11 is more like a drug experience than a political documentary. It's a mind-bending, half-digested mass of video clips, interviews, statistics, rampant speculation and the cheap gags Moore has never been able to resist.
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| 70 |
Film Threat
Pete Vonder Haar
Where earlier Moore films showcased a fair amount humor, even when covering weighty topics, Fahrenheit – especially the latter half – gives us Moore at his most serious.
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| 70 |
The Onion (A.V. Club)
As much as the jurors at this year's Cannes Film Festival insisted that the Palme D'Or was awarded to the best film in competition, it was a sign of the times that they chose to honor Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11, marking a clear and decisive victory for ideology over aesthetics.
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| 70 |
Washington Post
In Fahrenheit 9/11, Moore largely stays out of the picture, and the film is the better for it. But otherwise his style hasn't changed.
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| 67 |
Seattle Post-Intelligencer
The sum of all this is moderately rousing and deliciously irreverent in the Moore style, but not earthshaking as journalism, and devoid of anything that the average person doesn't already know from reading the newspaper.
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| 63 |
The Globe and Mail (Toronto)
Aesthetically, this isn't a great documentary, although, during the first half, there are great moments in it. But the latter part is scattered and frenzied, rather like an excited dog tearing off after too many rabbits at once -- a thematic hunt that's all chase and scant context.
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| 63 |
ReelViews
The real problem with Fahrenheit 9/11 isn't that it attacks the current Republican administration, but that it does so clumsily and with poor focus.
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| 63 |
New York Post
Basically a two-hour argument for regime change that isn't half as incendiary or persuasive as its maker would have you believe.
|
| 60 |
LA Weekly
Even as you're laughing, you get the uncomfortable sense you're being recruited, and not always honestly, to Moore's us-and-them point of view.
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| 60 |
Newsweek
David Gates
That's the real problem with Fahrenheit 9/11: not the message, but the method… Moore’s default mode is overkill: he even notes that on the night before the attacks Bush slept on "fine French linen." Surely scratchy muslin wouldn't have stopped the evildoers.
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| 60 |
Wall Street Journal
At its best, Fahrenheit 9/11 is an impressionist burlesque of contemporary American politics that culminates in a somber lament for lives lost in Iraq. But the good stuff -- and there's some extremely good stuff -- keeps getting tainted by Mr. Moore's poison-camera penchant for drawing dark inferences from dubious evidence.
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| 60 |
TV Guide
Moore's desperate need for attention is irritating, but it's also his strength as a gadfly; it drives him to needle sacred cows and received wisdom that would otherwise go unchallenged.
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| 50 |
Charlotte Observer
The surprising thing about Michael Moore's polemic is not one-sidedness, which was a given: It's his failure to find devastating new weapons of mass destruction to aim at Bush's head. The smoking guns he holds up often fire blanks, and the ones that don't are mostly derringers.
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| 50 |
Slate
It delighted me; it disgusted me. I celebrate it; I lament it. I'm sure of only one thing: that I don't trust anyone--pro or con--who doesn't feel a twinge of doubt about his or her responses.
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| 50 |
Baltimore Sun
The problem is not merely that Moore preaches to the choir. It's that, at his worst, he's so bumptious and bullheaded that he helps keep that choir small and strident. In Fahrenheit 9/11, Moore is so anti-Bush that he becomes a Bizarro-world version of Bush himself: tone-deaf, spluttering, incapable of framing an intelligent debate.
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| 50 |
The New Republic
Fahrenheit 9/11 is sometimes slipshod in its making and juvenile in its travesty, and of course it has no interest in overall fairness to Bush. But it vents an anger about this presidency that, as the film's ardent reception shows, seethes in very many of us.
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| 40 |
The Hollywood Reporter
Moore stays "on message" here from first shot to last. There is no debate, no analysis of facts or search for historical context. Moore simply wants to blame one man and his family for the situation in Iraq the United States now finds itself in…So the real question is not how good a film is Fahrenheit 9/11 -- it is undoubtedly Moore's weakest -- but will a film help to get a president fired?
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| 40 |
Variety
Pic fails to provide any hard facts or make any incriminating connections that a reasonably informed person doesn't already know about, so intellectually Moore is largely preaching to the converted in this blatant cinematic 2004 campaign pamphlet.
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| 30 |
Salon.com
Moore's supporters are quick to impugn the liberal credentials of anyone who criticizes his presentation of the information he digs up (or, in some cases, makes up). For them, Michael Moore is the issues he talks about, so his detractors must be enemies of democratic principles. It's an old trick, akin to the way Pauline Kael was accused of being insensitive about the Holocaust when she didn't like "Shoah."
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