Being There is simply reminding us of how fragile our state of being actually is.

| Oct 3, 2024

Peter Sellers' last great performance came in this gently satiric look at the dawning mass media culture from the book by Jerzy Kosiński.

| Original Score: 4.5/5 | May 30, 2022

Alternately lovely and lacerating.

| Original Score: 3.5/4 | May 24, 2022

Under the direction of Hal Ashby, in his first film since Coming Home, Sellers gives an impressively disciplined performance, always taut and under control. The difficulty with the film, however, is that the screenplay is basically a one-joke story.

| Apr 7, 2022

Devoid of finger-wagging, bellicose tirades, or emotional manipulation, Being There is a scathing commentary on politics and the media that points out how patently easy is it to fool people, often with their own willful, enthusiastic participation.

| Original Score: 4.5/5 | Mar 8, 2022

Among the sharpest of all satires, Being There, released in 1979, would be the last great film made by director Hal Ashby, who had the most extraordinary track record of any filmmaker of the 1970s.

| Original Score: 4/4 | Feb 14, 2022

One of the rare cases in which a novel is translated into a film with its humor, insight, and pathos intact.

| Jan 11, 2021

The humor continues to surface, regularly generating laugh-out-loud bewilderment and crushing awkwardness.

| Original Score: 9/10 | Aug 27, 2020

That ... Chance [is] perfectly aware of when others expect his contribution and of that contribution's general tenor, is nothing short of a high-wire act.

| Jul 1, 2020

Gently directed by Hal Ashby, this satire of a ruling class in which nobody knows anything is almost plausible, and certainly topical.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Jan 17, 2020

The result must be one of the boldest of commercial comedies, for the way it turns on passages of dead time, the dreadful pauses while other characters struggle to see the significance in each of Chance's cryptically meaningless remarks.

| Jan 16, 2020

What started as a fable ends up being a satire and that is precisely where the story becomes tedious and long, at the same time that it shows its weakest side. [Full Review in Spanish]

| Sep 20, 2019

Closed out the 1970's with a knowing smile, mourning that which was to come, and celebrating an unassuming antidote to the decade's increasing sense of materialism and political polarization.

| Original Score: 4/4 | Jun 4, 2019

Sellers is funny in every moment; you just have to watch very closely.

| Original Score: 3/4 | May 13, 2019

Bolstered by Peter Sellers' wonderfully understated performance and a solid supporting cast, Kosinski's cleverly rewritten satire is brought to life effectively and entertainingly.

| Aug 27, 2018

A brutal look at America and Americans that gently lifts up the mirror image that television gives us of ourselves, smashes it on the marble floors of our political institutions and holds a chunk of jagged glass to our throats. And then makes us laugh.

| Apr 28, 2018

Sellers has never been better and he embellishes the detached, childlike innocence of this character with perfect style and timing. It's a deceptively simple performance, but it is essentially the core and substance of the film.

| Dec 19, 2016

Even in a chilly movie like this, deaths have resonance (whether they're on camera, or off).

| Original Score: 4/5 | Oct 20, 2014

Here is a comedy that valiantly defies both gravity and the latest Hollywood fashion.

| Jul 8, 2014

Hal Ashby's satirical parable on the way the USA surrenders itself to homespun evangelicalism gives Peter Sellers the role of a lifetime.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Jul 8, 2014