Maybe the film is too even tempered, and that might be the reason the film wasn't widely seen, but it deserves some serious attention while our world is burning more ways than one right now.

| Jun 27, 2022

For Peck, each of his films is as much a vehicle for political argument and posing philosophical questions as it is a way to offer alternative historical narratives.

| Jun 28, 2021

Perhaps the film's strongest value is really educational, which is not to say that the whole 112 minutes of it are not engagingly composed and excellently executed in all departments.

| Sep 3, 2020

August Diehl... invests the twentysomething Marx with a quick mind and a feverish impatience that propel the narrative forward, his energy a real asset to a film that trades heavily in ideas.

| Apr 9, 2020

a powerful, multi-lingual biopic

| Aug 27, 2018

Frames history in terms of a spreading ideology. The resulting character study is leaden yet sobering.

| Aug 20, 2018

Peck's focus is on how the ideas [are] not mere airy abstraction. Diehl and Konarske are game, their performances rippling with the physical thrill of sharing the pursuit of knowledge amid an atmosphere of censorship, police raids and concerted opposition

| Original Score: 7/10 | Jun 23, 2018

Peck's work is handsome; what it lacks is a true sense of danger, a feeling of history roiling in the present tense.

| Original Score: 2.5/4 | Jun 21, 2018

His film works as a well-informed and intelligent biopic, not as a vulgar propaganda film. [Full review in Spanish]

| Original Score: 2/4 | May 23, 2018

It doesn't exactly work, but compelling performances - and Peck's intrepidly weird attempts to somehow make reading, writing and thinking cinematic - make it watchable just the same.

| Original Score: 3.5/5 | May 18, 2018

Kolja Brandt's cinematography makes a modest production budget look lavish.

| Original Score: 4/5 | May 11, 2018

An excessively bourgeois film.

| Original Score: 2/5 | May 9, 2018

The witty, astute script explores seriously textured themes.

| Original Score: 4/5 | May 7, 2018

There are no memorable shots in the film and Peck seldom attempts to tell the story, or at least exemplify its themes, through visual means. It actually looks a lot like it was made to be consumed on television.

| Original Score: 2/5 | May 5, 2018

One may conclude Raoul Peck's biopic is so absorbing because Marx's ideas remain so full of fire and so alive.

| May 4, 2018

Is the whole thing kind of silly? Yes, but maybe not quite enough. Will it inspire the masses to take up the Manifesto anew? Now, that's funny.

| Mar 30, 2018

Raoul Peck is somewhat overwhelmed by the challenge of enlivening both history and the writerly process-of dramatizing footnotes, as it were.

| Mar 22, 2018

A compelling story of how near we came to losing Marx' message then, and how near we are to losing it now.

| Original Score: 7/10 | Mar 16, 2018

Raoul Peck skillfully traces the pitfalls of any possible comic effect. [Full Review in Spanish]

| Original Score: 3/5 | Mar 14, 2018

Peck ... does a marvelous, meticulous job recreating the period look and feel of various European cities of the mid-1800s.

| Mar 2, 2018