Bisbee '17
4th Row Films | Release Date: September 5, 2018 CRITIC SCORE DISTRIBUTION
87
METASCORE
Universal acclaim based on 22 Critic Reviews
Positive:
22
Mixed:
0
Negative:
0
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Critic Reviews

Critic scorePublicationBy date
100
Slant MagazineChuck BowenSep 5, 2018
The film's epic canvas invigorates Robert Greene, who fuses a procedural documentary, in the key of Frederick Wiseman’s films, with tableaux that wouldn’t be out of place in a horror western. Read full review
100
VarietyNick SchagerAug 29, 2018
It’s an investigation into memory, intolerance, corporate-labor conflicts and race relations that’s as audacious as it is timely — and further confirms that director Robert Greene is one of America’s finest new voices in nonfiction. Read full review
93
Paste MagazineAndrew CrumpOct 3, 2018
As the crimes of the deportation haunts Bisbee and its inhabitants, so, too, are we haunted by them through the filter of Greene’s lens. But that experience, the experience of being haunted, proves vital. Maybe it’s necessary to let history haunt us. If we don’t, we’ll never be able to move beyond it. Read full review
90
Film ThreatChris SalceSep 27, 2018
I really liked that Robert Greene chose to have the citizens of Bisbee play the roles of the strikers and deputies the reenactment. I feel that it really added something special to the documentary. Read full review
90
Los Angeles TimesJustin ChangSep 26, 2018
One of the pleasurable discoveries of this continually surprising movie is that artifice can be the most direct route to the truth. Read full review
90
Arizona RepublicBill GoodykoontzSep 11, 2018
If Greene had simply told the story in more straightforward documentary fashion, Bisbee ’17 would be an interesting film. By telling the story within the story, he’s done something more: He’s made an urgent, powerful one. Read full review
90
The New York TimesA.O. ScottSep 4, 2018
Even though Bisbee ’17 depicts a wholesome and harmonious community undertaking, it is a profoundly haunted and haunting film. What we are witnessing is not the commemoration of a past disaster but its reanimation. Every important thing this movie is about is still alive. Read full review
90
Village VoiceBilge EbiriSep 3, 2018
The director purposefully pulls us this way and that, weaving cinematic spells and then yanking us out of them; as viewers, we are both inside and outside the story. Read full review
90
VoxAlissa WilkinsonAug 29, 2018
Bisbee ’17 is a fierce, lyrical probe into the soul of a town haunted by a history it would rather forget. It’s also an unsettling cipher for America, in a year when the ghosts of our past revealed themselves in frightening ways. Read full review
90
The New YorkerRichard BrodyAug 29, 2018
With microcosms of microcosms and reflections of reflections, Greene offers a passionately ambitious, patiently empathetic mapping of modern times. Read full review
88
Washington PostAnn HornadayOct 24, 2018
The result, Bisbee ’17, is a fascinating exercise in nonfiction filmmaking as a performative, interdisciplinary, collective act, as well as a provocative inquiry into how selective memory, ideology, shame and unspeakable trauma shape what we come to accept as official history. Read full review
88
RogerEbert.comMatt Zoller SeitzSep 5, 2018
Bisbee '17 is also about the artifice of storytelling and the alchemy of acting, and that magic moment when we decide to forget that we're seeing performers pretending to be long-dead people. Read full review
85
Vanity FairK. Austin CollinsSep 11, 2018
It’s interested in the continuum between then and now—and in the ways our own knowledge of community, and of ourselves in the world, can determine how we embody the lives of others. It’s the consummate act of empathy: restoring the past by bringing it to bear, in a real way, on our own lives. Read full review
83
IndieWireDavid EhrlichAug 29, 2018
The result is a singularly American riff on “The Act of Killing,” a fascinating and dream-like mosaic that’s less driven by residual anger than by cockeyed concern, less interested in exhuming the past than in revealing its value to the present. Read full review
83
The Film StageDaniel SchindelJun 27, 2018
Bisbee ’17 collapses past and present into one another, and in doing so achieves a singularly strange and unsettling vision of apparently intractable American hatreds. Read full review
80
Time OutJoshua RothkopfSep 30, 2018
How filmmaker Robert Greene got an entire town to ham it up remains a mystery, but his gift for inviting self-interrogation (also on display in his equally fascinating Kate Plays Christine, a 2016 hybrid about an actor’s plunge into the life of a suicidal newscaster) marks him as an innovator who may become a future Errol Morris. Read full review
80
The New YorkerAnthony LaneSep 10, 2018
Their amateur restaging of the deportation is at the core of Greene’s movie, which grows into an adventurous exercise in drama-documentary; what could have seemed arch or awkward is handled with grace and tact, and there is even a song. Not that all hurts are healed. The rifts and scars, like those in the landscape, are here to stay. Read full review
80
SlateSam AdamsSep 5, 2018
Greene lets the contemporary resonances reveal themselves by implication rather than thrusting them upon us. Read full review
80
The Hollywood ReporterSheri LindenAug 29, 2018
Greene is concerned with Western mythology and the interplay of past and present in Bisbee's self-dramatization. His intense focus on individuals can feel limiting in terms of the overall truth-and-reconciliation dynamic, but it also leads to some powerful moments. And the story's contemporary resonance couldn't be clearer. Read full review
78
Austin ChronicleRichard WhittakerOct 3, 2018
What Greene both shows and helps enable may be the first steps toward a new understanding in a shattered community. Read full review
75
Entertainment WeeklyChris NashawatySep 6, 2018
There’s no denying that Bisbee ’17 has some moments of deep elegiac power or, for that matter, that Greene’s ambition is boundless. But by the end, I often felt like his blurring of the past and the present was an experiment that was easier to admire than be swept up by. Read full review
75
The A.V. ClubMike D'AngeloSep 4, 2018
This one transforms practically the whole of Bisbee into a memorably uneasy amateur theatrical production. Read full review
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