[There] are more high-profile women who enjoyed personal-reclamation documentaries that reframed the ruthless misogyny they suffered... Hite doesn’t have the name recognition, but she certainly deserves a sympathetic documentary like this, too.

| Sep 13, 2024

It’s a fascinating and enraging film and a timely reminder of the courage of members of the feminist vanguard.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Jan 14, 2024

... This refreshing documentary makes an excellent case for [Hite's] reintroduction as a sex-positive icon.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Jan 12, 2024

The final third of the documentary slows to a deflated sigh, however, as Newnham struggles to make it a fitting conclusion to the high-stakes drama that preceded it.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Jan 12, 2024

Nicole Newnham’s superb documentary charts the dramatic rise and fall of this brave woman who optimistically remarked that “equality doesn’t seem dangerous to me.”

| Jan 12, 2024

A melancholy tale about a true iconoclast.

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

This is a fascinating and ultimately alarming documentary, which suggests — after the overturning of Roe vs Wade — that Hite’s battles for women’s bodily autonomy are now to be fought all over again.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Jan 11, 2024

If this documentary doesn’t make Hite a household name among a new generation of feminists, the biopic that should really follow it certainly will.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Jan 10, 2024

Filmmaker Nicole Newnham strives to put Hite’s name back in the public sphere with documentary The Disappearance of Shere Hite by giving an account of her fascinating life alongside the media backlash that would bury her name and reputation.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Jan 9, 2024

While [Oprah] footage is the linchpin connecting the good will earned beforehand and slander that followed, Newnham does a wonderful job accompanying it with the context necessary to understand its relevance to both Hite's life and America at-large.

| Original Score: 8/10 | Jan 5, 2024

The experiences are a stark reminder that the American experiment in democracy and liberty is built on gender and ethnic prejudice...

| Dec 28, 2023

It refreshingly brings back memories of the forgotten bisexual feminist icon Sherry Hite.

| Original Score: B+ | Dec 28, 2023

Nicole Newnham's The Disappearance of Shere Hite is a powerful portrait of divisive celebrity

| Original Score: 9/10 | Dec 21, 2023

Director Nicole Newnham & Dakota Johnson show Shere Hite as a colorful and romantic character who fought hard for women to have sexual satisfaction and a rightful place among men. She asked, “Why is equality dangerous?” A question women still ask today. 

| Dec 11, 2023

Though its primary focus is Hite, who died in 2020, the documentary ends up making salient points about the precarity of feminist media across generations.

| Dec 5, 2023

The Disappearance of Shere Hite goes a long way toward rectifying the wrongs done to her, whether in the name of erasure, ridicule or willful misunderstanding. She deserved better, and now she finally has it — even though it’s still hellishly hard.

| Original Score: 4/4 | Nov 30, 2023

Newnham’s seamless documentary leans heavily on diary entries — read by Dakota Johnson — archival videos and interviews to bring a complex person to multi-dimensional life.

| Original Score: 3.5/4 | Nov 30, 2023

The film is very good. It's very strong, this film.

| Nov 29, 2023

One of the best documentaries of the year.

| Nov 29, 2023

Maybe we know Hite only slightly better when The Disappearance of Shere Hite ends than when it starts, but because of Newnham’s rigor, we certainly understand her better.

| Original Score: 7.7/10 | Nov 22, 2023