Critic Reviews
| 75 |
San Francisco Chronicle
It's an intriguing portrait, but it makes no pretense at objectivity, erring on the side of hero worship.
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| 75 |
Boston Globe
Erin Meister
A thought-provoking and graceful portrait of a tenacious peace warrior whose frankness is his greatest weapon.
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| 70 |
Village Voice
Unfortunately, Rae's film is split down the middle, and the appeal of its latter half depends on your tolerance for earnest politico-poetry set to wailing rock guitar and Native American chants and extraneously endorsed by celebrity talking heads. The backstory portion of the film, though, is riveting.
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| 63 |
TV Guide
Rae's 80-minute film isn't able to answer every question or flesh out important details of these events, and she spends more time on Trudell's artistic endeavors than on his direct political action.
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| 60 |
The New York Times
Jeannette Catsoulis
No one in the film has a bad word to say about Mr. Trudell, despite his 17,000-page F.B.I. dossier; and by the time Robert Redford assures us that meeting him is not dissimilar to meeting the Dalai Lama, you may feel that all this worship does not do justice to an unusually stormy and complicated life.
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| 60 |
Variety
More hagiography than history, Heather Rae's long-in-production portrait of Native American activist and poet John Trudell has the uncritically admiring feel of authorized biography.
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| 58 |
The Onion (A.V. Club)
Anyone looking for history lessons from Rae's documentary will have to be patient and alert enough to pick through the poetry.
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| 50 |
The Hollywood Reporter
Feels padded in some places, truncated in others. It also feels too respectful, especially when its subject is such a deep thinker and questioner of authority.
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| 50 |
New York Daily News
Rae does offer a riveting introduction to the American Indian civil rights movement.
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| 50 |
Los Angeles Times
Unfortunately, absent a more objective context, Trudell's gnomic utterances do little to support those sentiments. By preaching so relentlessly to the choir, this film misses an opportunity to show what got them to sing in the first place.
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| 40 |
LA Weekly
Tim Grierson
How could a movie about someone with one of the nation's longest FBI files be this dull?
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| 40 |
Austin Chronicle
The man whom the FBI described as "extremely eloquent, therefore extremely dangerous" here seems about as threatening as Mother Teresa.
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| 40 |
Film Threat
Bob Westal
While Trudell has a few interesting and emotional moments in its second half, from the start it is badly hobbled by its worshipful tone.
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| 25 |
New York Post
Politics aside, Trudell plays like an infomercial for its subject rather than a serious examination of the man and his beliefs.
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