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Vice

2018

Adam McKay

Christian Bale, Amy Adams, Steve Carell, Sam Rockwell ...

6.8

17,414

Drama. Comedy VICE explores how a bureaucratic Washington insider quietly became the most powerful man in the world as Vice-President to George W. Bush, reshaping the country and the globe in ways still felt today.

	Author	Review
United States	Todd McCarthy The Hollywood Reporter	"A scorchingly audacious and dark tragicomedy (...) [A] deep dish satire of the sort that is in generally short supply; beyond that, it illuminates how the track was laid to help us arrive at where we are today"	POS
United States	Owen Gleiberman Variety	"Christian Bale does a virtuoso turn as Dick Cheney (...) but [it] never shows us what made Cheney tick (...) Brashly entertaining but not, in the end, as rich or deep as you want it to be"	NEU
United States	A. O. Scott The New York Times	"As biography, in other words, the movie works pretty well. As history, though, it’s another story — at once tendentious and undercooked, proposing a reductive, essentially conspiratorial account of recent events."	NEU
United States	Peter Travers Rolling Stone	"It’s a movie that’s ferociously funny one minute, bleakly sorrowful the next (...) [McKay] hits pay dirt whenever he drops us into the place where the political and the personal collide (…) Rating: ★★★★ (out of 5)"	POS
United States	Stephanie Zacharek Time	"McKay has more respect for Cheney’s wiles, as distasteful as they may be, than he does for his audience. He’s hip to Dick Cheney’s intelligence; he just doesn’t think much of ours."	NEG
United States	Sara Stewart New York Post	"Can someone please put McKay in charge of all the biopics? Instead of the typical, dutiful slog (...) [McKay] has a ball with his Cheney profile, playing gleefully within the genre while (…) Rating: ★★★½ (out of 4)"	POS
United States	Joshua Rothkopf Time Out	"The ensemble is magnificently rude and amoral, but even better is Vice's thrusting spirit of montage - daredevil editing that hasn't been attempted since the high-flying heyday of Oliver Stone (…) Rating: ★★★★ (out of 5)"	POS
United States	Eric Kohn IndieWire	"It offers a smart and detailed overview of Cheney’s elaborate ruse to exploit the country’s highest authority, but undercuts its authority with crass and often clunky humor that overstates the nature of Cheney’s villainy."	NEU
United States	Scott Mendelson Forbes	"It fails as entertainment and within the realm of artistic value (...) It’s exceptionally well-acted, but that’s not enough, especially when it’ll mostly play to folks who never bought what Cheney was selling in the first place."	NEG
United States	Brian Truitt USA Today	"It’s a strange little amalgamation that totally works: a vicious Shakespearean satire (...) but also a quasi-fictional go-for-broke biopic about a political leader we really don't know at all (…) Rating: ★★★½ (out of 4)"	POS
United States	Leah Greenblatt Entertainment Weekly	"[A] slick, wildly meta, and occasionally too-clever portrait of the most influential and easily least understood figure to ever hold the nation's second-highest post."	POS
United States	David Edelstein Vulture	"[Bale] nails Cheney’s chilling half-smile (...) 'Vice' has a big structural problem, though. However fitfully inspired, the narrative doesn’t hold you"	NEU
United States	Richard Lawson Vanity Fair	"Adam McKay's film doesn't know what to do with Christian Bale's beguiling act of transformation (...) [It] gives little reason for us to laugh—or to do much of anything else but roll our eyes."	NEG
United States	William Bibbiani IGN	"A funny and vicious political commentary, revealing in clear, thrilling detail a man whom filmmaker Adam McKay considers one of the most insidious and dangerous political figures of the last fifty years."	POS
United States	Dana Stevens Slate	"At a moment when the whole country is choking on the bitter fruit the Bush administration planted, it’s hard to find much that’s funny about the likes of Dick Cheney."	NEG
United Kingdom	Peter Bradshaw The Guardian	"It’s a better film than 'The Big Short' because of a big, enjoyable, intelligent central performance in which Bale has the sense to do more with less (…) Rating: ★★★★ (out of 5)"	POS

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