It is in many ways Guy Maddin's most mainstream film.

| Jan 11, 2025

If some viewers can still cling onto The West Wing as a comfort watch... there’s something to be said for the appeal of a text offering the total flip side in its portrayal of centrism’s capabilities, especially one as full of punkish spirit as this.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Dec 11, 2024

If you like your satire incisive you should perhaps look elsewhere, but the state of the world looks even more laughably absurd through Maddin and the Johnsons’ wickedly warped lens.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Dec 10, 2024

With the age of globalism seemingly creaking to a close, there is something wildly mordant about Rumours — a portrait of the last technocrats, still talking bilateral supply chain management as the skies crack open.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Dec 7, 2024

It’s about the weaknesses of liberal democracies, which is a timely subject. Yet the punches do not land.

| Original Score: 2/5 | Dec 7, 2024

Although the script is aiming to mine some high-grade nonsense out of this promising scenario, it’s not up to the job, no matter how bizarre it gets.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Dec 5, 2024

Symbolism is a slippery slope, and at its core Rumours is less allegorical than it is surrealist: What makes it so enjoyable is the way that the characters take even the wackiest developments in stride.

| Nov 3, 2024

It kind of plays out like a horror melodrama set at Bandcamp.

| Oct 24, 2024

Hopefully, “Rumours” can kick off a new age of gonzo, let’s-all-laugh-in-fear-together entertainment.

| Oct 21, 2024

It’s a long and tedious slog to the finish line as we follow a group of paper-thin caricatures who are only mildly interesting and intermittently funny.

| Original Score: 2/4 | Oct 19, 2024

“Rumours” slowly becomes the kind of experience willing to subject its polite, well-groomed professional politicians to all sorts of film genres, the more disreputable the better.

| Original Score: 2.5/4 | Oct 17, 2024

Sporadically ingenious, occasionally chilling and entirely bonkers...

| Oct 17, 2024

You see where this is going: borderline funny, mildly amusing, kind of entertaining.

| Original Score: 2/4 | Oct 17, 2024

Even in the occasional stretches when the film drags or repeats itself, the central point of its satire of liberal-democratic world politics remains clear.

| Original Score: B | Oct 16, 2024

Yes, we know that global-leadership summits are often a waste of time. But “Rumours” isn’t.

| Original Score: 3.5/5 | Oct 16, 2024

A wonderfully surreal farce that also might be, bizarrely enough, the trio of filmmakers’ most accessible work ever.

| Oct 15, 2024

To be fair, you’ll have more than one chuckle—the film is consistently, cleverly entertaining, and that’s all it needs to be, even if I wondered if the younger Maddin might have found a way to imbue it with more passion and creative vigor.

| Original Score: 2.5/4 | Oct 11, 2024

As something that seeks to confuse and delight you in equal measures, this is seven courses of absurdity, served with a side of tongue in cheek from a trio who know what they’re doing, even if you’re not always sure what that is.

| Oct 10, 2024

The film is winningly defined by its peculiar admixture of national pride and self-deprecation.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Sep 6, 2024

Maddin and the Johnsons effectively develop their story — goofy and absurd though it may be — so that these constant digs at our ineffectual leaders do coalesce into something meaningful and alarming.

| Jun 4, 2024