There's just not enough poking around in the Bannon-verse by Morris.

| Oct 24, 2020

The movie's worth taking in, though, as a shaky confrontation with a very American kind of demon, one weaned on the shallow, heroic lies of Hollywood individualism, furious that life rarely works that way, and willing to wreck the house in response.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Jan 2, 2020

Kid-glove treatment of the former Donald Trump advisor is surprising coming from the hard-hitting interviewer of Robert McNamara and Donald Rumsfeld.

| Original Score: 2/4 | Dec 17, 2019

Give 'em enough rope, as they say. It's become increasingly fashionable to twist or ignore facts, but it's still important to present them for all to see.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Dec 5, 2019

Bannon has trafficked in racism, far-right conspiracy theories and other controversies during his career. Morris brings up some of it... but rarely nails Bannon with a tough follow-up question.

| Original Score: 2/4 | Dec 5, 2019

American Dharma is a vivisection, and [ Errol] Morris gives Bannon the tools to do it himself.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Nov 14, 2019

"American Dharma" is the gospel according to Stephen K. Bannon - a feature-length conversation with the Trump White House's former chief political advisor that is both more interesting and more depressing than you might be expecting.

| Nov 8, 2019

Where Klayman's film was anecdotal, letting Bannon hang himself with his arrogant disingenuousness, Morris' feels more intellectually rigorous - an interrogation that, by comparison, may not come across strongly enough to some as an indictment.

| Nov 7, 2019

It's the journalistic equivalent of Muhammad Ali's rope-a-dope strategy, and while Bannon is far too media-savvy to be one of Morris' best subjects, he doesn't clamp down tight, the way Rumsfeld did.

| Original Score: B | Nov 3, 2019

Morris does not lead you by the hand. If the subject is lying, or delusional, as he often seems to be, Morris presumes the viewer will notice.

| Nov 1, 2019

A rather florid, disjointed conversation, one where Morris' attempts to challenge and confront Bannon feels mostly cathartic for the filmmaker, ultimately, without yielding much additional insight to understanding Bannon that hasn't already been said.

| Nov 1, 2019

A frustratingly hollow look at Bannon that is ultimately so benign in its portrayal of the man that it comes closer to an example of fan service than a full takedown.

| Original Score: 2/4 | Nov 1, 2019

Morris wants to map how Bannon thinks. The movie he has made is less an act of muckraking than it is a psychological thriller, with Bannon its implacable villain.

| Oct 31, 2019

The film feels rather like listening to the arsonist calmly explain why he set the fire as we continue to watch it rage.

| Original Score: 2/4 | Oct 27, 2019

If anything, we should be thanking Errol Morris, who sat across from Stephen Bannon for days on end listening to his stories - so we didn't have to.

| Oct 18, 2018

"American Dharma" succeeds neither as journalism nor as portraiture, neither as political critique nor as cultural survey nor as psychological study.

| Oct 4, 2018

What the director cannot seem to do... is get Bannon to reveal anything of himself that the man isn't already willing to tell us.

| Sep 21, 2018

The camera stays on Bannon, and what we see is a man who reveals himself even as he thinks he's gaining the upper hand.

| Original Score: B+ | Sep 21, 2018

[Morris] occasionally pushes back against Bannon, in a way he didn't in the earlier films, and sort of has to - if Dharma suffers in comparison, it's because it's telling a story that's still in progress.

| Sep 14, 2018

American Dharma isn't a dismantling of Bannon's ideologies. It's a portrait of delusion.

| Original Score: 4.5/5 | Sep 11, 2018