Meeting Gorbachev

Name: Meeting Gorbachev
Genre: Documentary
Released: May 3, 2019
Duration: 90 min
Rating: 72
Cast: George Shultz, James Baker, Konstantin Chernenko, Lech Walesa, Leonid Brezhnev

2019

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Generally favorable reviews based on 22 Critic Reviews

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USER SCORE

Generally favorable reviews based on 8 Ratings

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6.6	User Score Generally favorable reviews based on 8 Ratings

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Meeting Gorbachev

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Movie Details & Credits

The Orchard | Release Date: May 3, 2019 | Not Rated

Starring: George Shultz, James Baker, Konstantin Chernenko, Lech Walesa, Leonid Brezhnev, Margaret Thatcher, Mikhail Gorbachev, Miklos Nemeth, Raisa Maximovna Gorbacheva, Ronald Reagan, Vladimir Putin, Werner Herzog, Yuri Andropov

Summary: Rising from a farm boy to become President of the Soviet Union, Mikhail Gorbachev brought about changes that helped end the Cold War, toppled the USSR, enabled the reunification of Germany and transformed the world forever.

Director: Andre Singer and Werner Herzog

Genre(s): Documentary

Rating: Not Rated

Runtime: 90 min

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Critic Reviews

Brad Wheeler

May 16, 2019

Defining a politician’s titan legacy in a singularly unexpected way, Meeting Gorbachev meets its expectations. Read full review

William Bibbiani

May 3, 2019

The real show here is Herzog and Gorbachev, two of the most interesting people in the world, getting to know each other, asking the big questions, fumbling through small talk, and becoming friends. Read full review

Anthony Lane

May 6, 2019

Historians of the period will learn nothing new from the movie, yet it remains a stirring enterprise, especially when it peers back, beyond the bright public record of Gorbachev’s heyday, into the mist of what feels like a distant past. Read full review

Chris Barsanti

May 1, 2019

Werner Herzog’s documentary is a rare example of the arch ironist’s capacity to be awed not by nature but by man. Read full review

Liam Lacey

May 17, 2019

Because the potential is extraordinary, it’s a surprise that the film, co-directed by Herzog and Andre Singer, is so conventional and enthusiastic, bordering on adoring. Read full review

Robert Abele

May 2, 2019

Less a journalistic endeavor than an admirer’s tour — with room for blackly funny Herzog-ian touches in his choice of archival clip or patently demonic voice-over. Read full review

Mike D'Angelo

Apr 30, 2019

The movie finally achieves some belated emotional power when it addresses, in its final minutes, Gorbachev’s beloved wife, Raisa, who died of leukemia in 1999. It does so, however, via clips from an entirely different documentary, Vitaly Mansky’s "Gorbachev: After Empire" (2001). Why not just watch that film, since Meeting Gorbachev never so much as mentions any event that’s happened since? Read full review

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Brent_Marchant

May 18, 2019

Despite a slight tendency to shortchange the first-person views of the principal subject (especially where his life outside of politics is concerned), director Werner Herzog's latest documentary presents a thorough look at the truly remarkable accomplishments of a pragmatic and visionaryDespite a slight tendency to shortchange the first-person views of the principal subject (especially where his life outside of politics is concerned), director Werner Herzog's latest documentary presents a thorough look at the truly remarkable accomplishments of a pragmatic and visionary statesman, one whose work was abruptly stopped short by opportunists who kept him from seeing things all the way through. Some might term this a love letter to the former Soviet leader, but in many ways it also helps to set the record straight on his achievements and how he sadly became a tragic hero. Gorbachev's admonishments for the current geopolitical situation serve as an insightful warning against letting history repeat itself and undoing everything that he did that his predecessors were unable to accomplish. Genuinely moving and inspired viewing.… Expand

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Mauro_Lanari

Nov 11, 2021

(Mauro Lanari)
With a real documentary, without fictitious inserts and after abandoning the cinema of "acting", Herzog finds in Gorbachev another figure worthy of his best cinema, and explains it himself in the film: a character from Greek tragedy, aware of having stubbornly desired a dream(Mauro Lanari)
With a real documentary, without fictitious inserts and after abandoning the cinema of "acting", Herzog finds in Gorbachev another figure worthy of his best cinema, and explains it himself in the film: a character from Greek tragedy, aware of having stubbornly desired a dream too big and beyond the limit, a man who on his grave would like to be written a humble "We tried", both on the human and political fronts. Yet there is an abysmal difference between the various "Aguirre" or "Fitzcarraldo" and "Gorbachev": this time it is not the defeat of a delirium of omnipotence, of a utopian idealist who crashes against Nature and its indomitable laws, but of a statesman who was demonstrating how the Leninist way to a "human" communism was viable, so much so that the conservative forces dismissed him with a putsch. The "repubblichino" Ezio Mauro plays dumb denying the historical and macroeconomic evidence: the fall of the Wall in '89 was only a consequence of the multiple reforms carried out during his secretariat from 1985 to 1991. Growing up in a kolkhoz, he had learned to increase the purchasing power not by raising incomes, salaries and wages (see Landini and today's false left), but by keeping prices down and therefore the cost of living. The variables to modify the gap between rich and poor are 2, and a left that is truly such acts on the second, not on the first one.… Expand

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