Popular reviews

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  Review by matt lynch ★★★

  Fascinating for Stone in that it both lacks (mostly) simple empathy and yet (confoundingly for some) still refuses to paint Bush as actively malevolent as opposed to merely stupid. But I think the real problem here is that Stone reserves a special scorn for people who don't believe in anything, and that makes for a fundamental disconnect, something that didn't plague, say, NIXON, and it poisons everything here with smugness, especially in the dull laundry list of its subject's many famous gaffes but also in the depiction of Texas culture and Bush's fratboy personality as some rancid nightmaricana (tm) even while there's an attempt to get inside the man's crippling anxiety in the shadow of his father and family. Nice try but too timid on all fronts.

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  Review by Josh Lewis ★★ 1

  For whatever reason (checked by the box office rejection of Nixon and Alexander, the rushed production, or just a general lack of inspiration) Stone can't muster up any of that manic urgency that fueled JFK and Nixon and instead makes the kind of flat, prestige, ripped-from-the-headlines moron failson lifetime movie anyone else could have. "Who do you think you are? A Kennedy? You're a Bush! Act like one." A very sad whimper of a conclusion to his trilogy on American presidents but the re-enactment of Bush nearly choking to death on a pretzel while watching football was pretty funny, and Brolin gets pretty close to selling that line about how “enhanced interrogation techniques” remind him of his frat days.

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  Review by Eli Hayes ★★★½ 4

  didn't know that
  Colin Powell and
  Condoleezza Rice
  were the standouts
  on HBO's Westworld.

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  Review by Amanda Dobbins ★½ 2

  Saw this movie opening weekend at Union Square and sat right behind Anna Wintour. This has been a film review.

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  Review by chavel ★★★★ 1

  The ever underappreciated Oliver Stone made a lingering political portrait that dared to dissect, with means of psychological probing, the professional fallacies and personality inadequacies of George W. Center stage is the astounding Josh Brolin, stupendous going from good ol' boy recklessness to overblown hubris that he is the only one who could ever steer the country right. As president, George Jr. wants to outshine his father’s legacy; the father whose course of action as former president was too slow, not thorough enough. The film sees baseball as W.’s first love obsession, and politics as not so much as a love obsession but as a heritage entitlement. The subversive factor is that the film only seems to bask in the…

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  Review by Avatar2009Fan ★★ 8

  why the fuck would you make a weirdly sympathetic portrait of george w. bush in 2008 of all years

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  Review by Will Sloan ★½

  "Axis of... Hatred?"
  "No... something about it just misses..."

  This highlight-reel of the Bush Era's Greatest Hits felt redundant in 2008, and now plays like pure 2000s kitsch. It's an eerie and uncanny experience seeing these once-familiar incidents badly re-enacted by celebs.

  The tone veers gracelessly from earnest drama to ham-fisted satire (we see a cable news show called "Spinball"). Every piece of exposition is crammed with factoids. Certain of the performances (Thandie Newton as Condoleezza Rice, Jeffrey Wright as Colin Powell) would not have passed muster on MadTV. This started filming in May 2008 and was in theatres by October, and the production values are only slightly better than a Syfy Channel original.

  This is a one-star movie, but I'm giving it an extra half-star for Dreyfuss and Cromwell, and for the fact that I was entertained throughout.

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  Review by baradetski ★★★

  committing war crimes to own your poppy

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  Review by Bob Hovey ★★★ 1

  Oliver Stone's film about George W. Bush paints an interesting picture of our 43rd president. Stone's not really known for subtlety, but he does seem to seek some sort of balance here, showing us W.'s likable side along with his flaws, and giving us some insight into the family issues that drove him. Josh Brolin does a remarkable job of sustaining that balance, and it's primarily his performance that holds our interest through the film.

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  Review by finchsam ★★★★

  While I agree that Stone's made-too-soon cinematic treatment of Dubya's time spent as commander-in-chief feels incomplete and in many ways, soft, I like it. a lot. I like how it keeps its focus more on the man than on the failures of his administration, I like how it's structured and paced, I like the "daddy issues" theme that runs throughout the narrative, and even though he doesn't disappear into the role, I like Brolin's portrayal. To me, this is Stone's most underrated movie, and it's not even close.

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  Review by megan ★★★

  george w. bush is thanos

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  Review by Matthew Christman ★★ 1

  Everything about the new film W, from its compact, guerrilla-style production schedule earlier this year to its mid-October release, right before the election, suggests that director Oliver Stone wants his film to serve as the epitaph of the Bush administration. Instead, it plays like a highlight reel of live-action political blog posts from the 2002-2004. We get all of George W. Bush's youthful fecklessness, his wacky malapropisms, a decent thumbnail sketch of the run up to the Iraq war, and some dime store psychoanalysis, but nothing that a politically aware person hasn't heard or read about hundreds of times by this late date.

  W is Stone's most restrained film in many years, both visually and thematically. There are no randomly…