Fahrenheit 11/9
Directed by Michael Moore Michael Moore’s new documentary is “one of the most urgent films ever made,” said David Edelstein in New York magazine. The Oscar-winning polemicist has made tauter movies, but he’s rarely been as alarmed or as original as he proves to be in this busy, crowded diatribe about how America wound up electing Donald Trump as president. It’s “something of a bait-and-switch”—a movie about the Trump era that treats President Trump as symptom rather than cause of a democracy in grave crisis. It’s also funny before it turns abruptly sobering and then spins out a call for activism. An extended detour about the ongoing water crisis in Flint, Mich., proves unexpectedly effective, said Owen Gleiberman in Variety. Moore’s point— “a profound one”—is that the government we count on for basic protections is being dismantled everywhere by corporate interests. But then he embarks on a number of tangents, including an “utterly specious” argument that the mainstream media has been proved untrustworthy by #MeToo revelations about certain stars. Though Moore eventually compares Trump’s rhetoric with Hitler’s, “he reserves his most angry, pointed, and well-constructed criticisms” for establishment Democrats, including Barack Obama, said Alissa Wilkinson in Vox.com. Do something, he’s urging his liberal audience. In the end, “there’s something in this film to irritate everyone.”