Hollywoodgate shows the disturbing results of the power vacuum created by US military intervention in Afghanistan.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Sep 17, 2024

“Hollywoodgate” is a fascinatingly — and sometimes frustratingly — oblique portrait of a country and its people in the tragic grip of extremism.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Aug 30, 2024

[A] fascinating, chilling film.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Aug 19, 2024

It’s a fascinating, chilling, if limited study of how the endless cycle of global warfare plays out.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Aug 19, 2024

It’s not often that you see a prestige documentary where the film-maker is in constant danger of being summarily executed by his subjects, but that is the central sickening tension that drives this superlative movie from Ibrahim Nash’at.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Aug 16, 2024

Offering an intimate look at their daily lives, Nash’at’s film does a rather brilliant job of offering a raw and uncompromising insight into Afghanistan’s new ruling class, who allow him to film them, despite their obvious mistrust for him throughout.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Aug 16, 2024

What goes unseen? Ordinary Afghans. But then, the film’s sharpest insight is tied up with what is missing from the picture: none of the Taliban want Nash’at to record the actual people they govern.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Aug 15, 2024

Hollywoodgate is revelatory: truly brave film-making.

| Aug 14, 2024

At the risk of sounding flip, something in the deadpan tone of this documentary makes it begin to feel like the most serious and terrifying episode of The Office that you've ever watched.

| Aug 3, 2024

A brave and powerful documentary.

| Aug 3, 2024

It’s a film that feels like an overture to an international crisis, a warning as much as a documentary.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Jul 21, 2024

Suggests that the Taliban are engaged in an elaborate role-playing performance for which they’re unqualified.

| Jul 20, 2024

The risks required to make this documentary also highlight its limitations... The frustration of “Hollywoodgate” is that it could only ever feel incomplete.

| Jul 18, 2024

The spoils of war are a chore in this fascinating fly-on-the-wall study of the Taliban’s first year in power.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Sep 1, 2023

Hollywoodgate throws us in the deep end and compels us to swim. For the most part it’s worth the effort.

| Aug 31, 2023

There’s another, even more instructive function here the film provides, though: Much of what we see is what the Taliban wants us to see, but as that’s what’s really important to them, it’s also what we need to see to understand them.

| Original Score: B+ | Aug 31, 2023

The sledgehammer impact of “Hollywoodgate” comes from director Nash’at peering into the Taliban leadership’s inner circle for a year and finding not even a glimmer of goodness.

| Aug 31, 2023