You grow surprisingly attached to Val Kilmer as this goes along, and prepared to indulge his pretentious side as he grapples for a state of grace.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Dec 7, 2021

A raw, honest portrait of self-reflection by one of Hollywood's biggest names in a personally and professionally challenging period of transition.

| Original Score: 4.5/5 | Aug 11, 2021

It presents an actor reckoning not only with the imprint left upon him by his roles, but with how to reconstitute one of his most difficult moments into a period of freedom.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Aug 9, 2021

It's vibrant, quick, and alive, and Val Kilmer today makes for an entertaining guide, with his hammy facial gestures now doing double duty since he can't talk.

| Aug 8, 2021

The moral of "Val," may be that Kilmer is his own worst enemy, an idea that gives the film its diffused power.... "Val" certainly engenders sympathy, but at times it feels like crocodile tears.

| Aug 6, 2021

The result is undoubtedly a canny mediation on the vagaries of fame, but it feels more intimate and essential than that: a lifetime of searching and self-regard distilled, somehow, into a state of grace.

| Original Score: B+ | Aug 6, 2021

This documentary is both great fun and deeply sad.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Aug 6, 2021

The video camcorder and the smartphone have made it possible for us all to admire our own selves -- but few have achieved Val Kilmer's level of expertise in this area.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Aug 4, 2021

It's sentimental, as obscuring as it is revealing, occasionally indulgent, offhandedly brilliant in spots and filled with oddball detours and self-regarding tangents. A perfect compliment to, and mirroring of Kilmer's career, in other words.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Aug 2, 2021

The actor Val Kilmer opens his massive home video archive to documentary filmmakers Ting Poo and Leo Scott to help sort through the captivating highs and lows of his career.

| Jul 30, 2021

Attuned to what's raw and heartfelt, "Val" reveals a Kilmer who has managed to process his identity/career not as a be-careful-what-you-wish-for story so much as a be-grateful-for-what-one-has experience.

| Jul 30, 2021

There's so much wishy washy talk about where the actor ends and the character begins, but if "Val" convinces us that Kilmer was able to blur that line... the film only shines flashes of light on who the actor is, and what drew him to the characters.

| Original Score: B- | Jul 30, 2021

It offers Kilmer a showcase that he has been denied, not only by the ravages of cancer but, long before, by the troubled course of his career and the inherent obstacles of Hollywood filmmaking.

| Jul 29, 2021

If you love movies and Val Kilmer, you will dig it. I ultimately found it really moving and really sad.

| Jul 27, 2021

It often plays like an exercise in image management, treading lightly on explosive autobiographical terrain from his adult life, but going deep on family trauma (particularly the childhood death of his brother Wesley) and tales out-of-school.

| Original Score: 2.5/4 | Jul 26, 2021

The likable actor offers his own revealing home video.

| Original Score: 3.5/4 | Jul 23, 2021

Perhaps foremost, "Val" nicely illustrates the ways in which its subject's aspirations as an artist periodically collided with the demands of commercial success, objectives that are frequently at odds.

| Jul 23, 2021

Val is the portrait of a striving artist, endlessly searching.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Jul 23, 2021

Draws us deep into the life and career of a bold and sometimes headstrong performer.

| Jul 23, 2021

While the promise of what he has might ultimately outweigh what he ends up giving us, there's just about enough to make Val an entertaining snapshot, at least until we get to see the bigger picture.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Jul 23, 2021