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Don't normally read NRO but it showed up in Google News and you could just tell from the title how *angry* they were going to be about a film that is designed to mess with your mind. You can almost hear the "how dare they?" screaming off the page. www.nationalreview.com/2026/10/the-...

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It's my boy Armond White! He's said insane shit for ages. He's pretty famous for being a contrarian (not just politically, but virtually everything). I have no clue if he's considered a serious critic by anyone, but I kind of adore that the NRO just employs an insane person so consistently.

He's not considered serious by anyone and he hasn't been for at least 15 years, minimum. He's a professional rage baiter and based his entire opinion on whether or not other people like something.

NRO basically has him spite-employed? Like they know his name will crop up hear the top of Rotten Tomatoes and Metacritic and he is essentially a parody of a film critic. Verbose and literate but also totally detached from reality and almost never bringing up anything substantial.

Love that he lists his credentials of detesting every innovative documentary of the past fifty years. Half expected him to cite Robert Flaherty as the last real documentarian!

As far as I can tell, the complaint is (1) that Fielder/Oppenheim didn't make a totally different movie about certain female politicians and (2) that they mess with the format a little in a way that surprised the critic such that he had to complain it's no different than what's been done before.

It's funny because the title calls it a "hideous deception" but the body whines that it's all been done before and might only "fool" millennials. My read is that the author got totally fooled and then got mad, and wanted to insist he wasn't fooled.

There is also a mild spoiler in the review so if you are trying to avoid "the hideous deception" of the film, don't read the entire review and just go see the film. The review doesn't really give it away but does reveal something that the marketing & other reviews avoid.

Maybe I'm just old but it brings to mind Hitchens' "The Lies Of Michael Moore", which did not in fact identify one single solitary lie.

It does mess with your brain but NRO is just gloming onto the hype. bsky.app/profile/r-s-...

What?!@r-s-s.bsky.social

But including Amanda Seyfried of The Dropout was a stroke of Tarantino-esque genius. It's as if Pulp Fiction had been a true story! bsky.app/profile/reut...