A fascinating look at an extraordinary personality.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/5 | Jun 15, 2012

The Island President is an important portrait of a determined man standing fast in a place where the ground is literally shifting beneath his feet.

Full Review | Original Score: 2.5/4 | Jun 14, 2012

If you are in a fight, you want this man on your side. He is charismatic, brave and most of all entirely believes in what he is what he is doing. I'm not sure he know the meaning of the word compromise.

| Jun 1, 2012

Climate-change documentaries are almost always disturbing, but "The Island President" communicates a special urgency.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/4 | May 3, 2012

Nasheed is indeed inspirational, a cool-headed but passionate and courageous guy. You end up wishing a lot more leaders were like this guy.

| Original Score: B+ | Apr 26, 2012

Shenk expertly weaves Nasheed's extraordinary personal story together with the Maldives' breathtaking natural beauty and a Capra-esque tale of dogged idealism and political courage to create wonderfully vivid cinematic portraiture.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Apr 20, 2012

What makes Nasheed's whirligig tactics so urgent is that, unlike most other countries participating in the summit, his own nation is actually in danger of being annihilated by climate change.

| Original Score: B+ | Apr 6, 2012

"The Island President"is heartening and unsettling by turns.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Apr 5, 2012

The Island President should be commended for offering a stark reminder that, while the world's great nations turned their attentions to economics, the waters continued to rise.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Mar 30, 2012

"The Island President" is a mostly compelling documentary about that rarest of breeds, an appealing politician.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Mar 30, 2012

"The Island President" personalizes the threat of global warming, and nationalizes it too, by focusing on Mohamed Nasheed, the former president of the Maldives.

| Mar 29, 2012

Ex-Maldives president Mohamed Nasheed comes across in this documentary as a kind of climate-change Prospero.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Mar 29, 2012

Sure it's hagiographic, but this is environmentalist filmmaking at its best.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Mar 29, 2012

What's fascinating and frustrating about The Island President is how it reveals international politics to be even more polarized and mired in bureaucracy than local politics.

| Original Score: B- | Mar 29, 2012

Viewers get an eye-opening look at behind-the-scenes wrangling.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Mar 29, 2012

A portrait of defiant optimism as a last-chance means of survival, Jon Shenk's The Island President offers not only a Mandela-like tale of political heroism but a much-needed perspective on climate change.

| Mar 28, 2012

The hope that infuses this movie makes it all the more upsetting to walk out of the theater and contemplate a looming disaster that the world's leaders seem unable to prevent.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/5 | Mar 28, 2012

It's fascinating to be so close to a then-sitting head of state as he negotiates for his homeland's survival, and the news that Nasheed was recently deposed in a coup by Gayoom loyalists makes the hard-won victories he did secure all the more poignant.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Mar 27, 2012

Moves swiftly from political scene-setting to follow Nasheed's every move as he prepares to make an impassioned environmental plea at the 2009 Copenhagen Climate Summit.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Mar 27, 2012

Shenk's film is close enough to his subject to catch the leader who rails against carbon-dioxide emissions puffing on cigarettes in parking lots.

| Mar 27, 2012