Meeting Gorbachev is about looking into the past from one man's perspective and seeing how a missed opportunity can unravel the entire planet.

| Original Score: 3.5/4 | Feb 26, 2022

The film is a mass of contradictions the muddle-headed Herzog never stops to try and reconcile.

| Feb 11, 2021

Fell short of expectations.

| Sep 18, 2020

On the face of it, this could be quite a hard sell, but it's not and the reason for that is the approach taken to questioning. It's not about dryly what happened and instead how Gorbachev feels about it.

| May 22, 2020

The film tends to move laterally between private memory, public spectacle, kitsch newscasts, and pithy historical asides. It portrays nostalgic recreations of a lost country with a faintly surreal, dreamlike texture.

| Feb 26, 2020

Werner Herzog has a knack for unearthing colourful characters with fascinating stories.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Jan 22, 2020

Meeting Gorbachev is neither shocking nor provocative, but it certainly provides a window into the former world leader, as well as Herzog himself.

| Jan 21, 2020

Aside from Herzog's sinewy delivery, much of Meeting Gorbachev feels like a regurgitated textbook with lots to recount but not much to say.

| Jan 17, 2020

Werner Herzog never quite recovers from having his opening question slapped down in this fitfully revealing, but always intriguing encounter with former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Nov 11, 2019

Herzog may usher his subject through a kind of swansong lifetime achievement testimony, but Meeting Gorbachev is also a film about the dying of the light...

| Original Score: 4/5 | Nov 11, 2019

[A] succinct and intimate documentary.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Nov 11, 2019

It's fascinating and moving.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Nov 11, 2019

Herzog captures a moment in history when, for a moment, it genuinely seemed as if the good guys had won.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Nov 11, 2019

Leave it to Werner Herzog. The iconoclastic German film-maker ditches the documentary rule book for this intimate profile of the 88-year-old former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Nov 11, 2019

For all [its] flaws, Meeting Gorbachev remains a fascinating study of a remarkable life.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Nov 8, 2019

Despite the film's obvious interest, it is a bit conceited and stately, a little like Wim Wenders' movie about Pope Francis, though without the sycophancy. Or almost.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Nov 8, 2019

Running through Gorbachev's life story and the seismic political changes he oversaw, Herzog frames him as a tragic figure whose decency and genuineness was his undoing - a pretty bleak but necessary reminder of how easily good work can be reversed.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Nov 8, 2019

Alas, the sweets do not have sugar but they are at least chocolates.

| Original Score: 5/5 | Nov 8, 2019

An important and interesting documentary about tumultuous times, then, but one that slightly suffers for being a touch too dry and over-friendly towards its subject.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Nov 7, 2019

Meeting Gorbachev a Werner Herzog documentary with a difference: it could be a documentary by anyone. It is that maddeningly bland.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Nov 6, 2019