In his own way, the ever-present director is as much a scene-hogger as Joaquin Phoenix with one glaring difference: Brügger's mercenaries are the real-deal, not heavy-handed, makeup-streaked clowns with mommy and daddy issues.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Jan 29, 2020

It is impossible in this paranoid-making era to watch Cold Case and not be made to feel uneasy by the secrets it unlocks and the human aptitude for evil that it exposes.

| Sep 5, 2019

Cold Case Hammarskjöld's wild postulations about secret political assassinations and biologically engineered viruses have a gripping, gruesome urgency: Watching it is like getting sucked into a Reddit thread at 3 in the morning.

| Aug 23, 2019

Six years in the making, Cold Case Hammarskjöld is by far [Mads] Brügger's most ambitious and engrossing documentary.

| Original Score: 3.5/5 | Aug 22, 2019

It's impossible to emerge from this film without being shaken to your core. Mission accomplished: Mind blown.

| Original Score: 4/4 | Aug 21, 2019

One thing is certain: If he's right about this one, he will have earned that pith helmet.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Aug 17, 2019

Brügger flip-flops between persuasive reality and outlandish make-believe, until the two are almost indecipherable from each other.

| Aug 16, 2019

A tremendously absorbing film, a documentary that plays like a first-rate thriller hinging on key issues of the Cold War and African decolonization.

| Original Score: 3.5/4 | Aug 16, 2019

The trip is entertaining and even instructive-not about the facts of the case, which go from murky to opaque, but about the slip-slidingly elusive nature of truth.

| Aug 16, 2019

You may not leave this movie satisfied, but you will be appalled - and chilled to the bone.

| Aug 15, 2019

An unusual blend of investigative journalism and tacky artifice.

| Aug 15, 2019

Just when you're ready to agree with Brügger's disclaiming admission that he's a lousy journalist and storyteller, the trail runs cold. Only then does the story roar back to sinister life, while the telling turns solemn.

| Aug 15, 2019

By the end of this nearly 2-1/2-hour film, which starts offhandedly and rather glibly but firmly rises to a bell-ringer of a finale, Brugger has connected many scattered dots.

| Original Score: 3.5/4 | Aug 15, 2019

"Cold Case Hammarskjold" is finally poised unsatisfyingly between an explosive exposé and a self-conscious put-on.

| Aug 15, 2019

Of all the new questions raised by this film, the hardest to answer may be "What was the point?"

| Aug 14, 2019

Told with fourth-wall-breaking, connect-the-dots mania, it's a heck of a story, extending beyond the 1960s into the AIDS pandemic, possible human medical experimentation, and phony vaccines.

| Original Score: B- | Aug 14, 2019

Maybe it's real or maybe it's wackadoodle, but a cold-case investigation is heated up considerably and imaginatively by Brugger's charismatic film.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Aug 14, 2019

People have died trying to tell this story, or appear to have died. There are photos and testimonies, and the trajectory as a whole makes terrible sense. I want to believe.

| Aug 14, 2019

There's nothing wrong with documentarians taking center stage in the drama of their own research, as... Werner Herzog demonstrates. The trouble with this ploy, however, is that you have to be Herzog, or a figure of comparable charisma, to pull it off.

| Aug 9, 2019

The film delivers a gut punch that I never saw coming.

| Original Score: 3.5/4 | May 14, 2019