Whitney offers a more complex portrait of the family that both aided Houston's rise and contributed to her downfall.

| Apr 5, 2022

The tempestuous life and sad death of pop diva Whitney Houston get an exhaustive documentary treatment from British director Kevin Macdonald... doing his best to implicate Houston's family and friends in her downfall.

| Mar 4, 2020

But not unlike the documentary Amy, we confront a young, innocent, bubbly, and energetic woman. And as we progress, we see and hear the degradation of not only Houston, but also her voice.

| Original Score: 2.5/4 | Aug 26, 2018

The Whitney Houston that Macdonald presents is a musician, an actress, a bullied child, a woman, an African-American, a daughter, a mother, a wife, and an addict. It's a sad song.

| Original Score: 3.5/5 | Jul 27, 2018

The film is a sad calamity of conflicting narratives as those closest to Houston work through varying stages of honesty and denial.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Jul 13, 2018

Whitney Houston just wanted to dance with somebody who loved her. But life moved too fast for the tragic pop diva.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Jul 12, 2018

[Kevin Macdonald] knows how to tell a story about a really complicated famous person and try to provide insight into that person that we think we already know.

| Original Score: 8/10 | Jul 10, 2018

An explosive and controversial documentary that sheds new light on her tragic and perhaps inevitable fall.

| Jul 10, 2018

[Macdonald's] "Whitney" is daring both emotionally and aesthetically, and gets to a kind of truth about Houston the public has never known before.

| Original Score: 4/4 | Jul 10, 2018

Whitney will be filed under "music documentaries" but it is no more about music than it is about carpentry or mathematics.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Jul 9, 2018

Macdonald makes artful use of jarring, subversive cuts to highlight the contradictions in Houston's career.

| Jul 9, 2018

By jarringly intercutting news footage with deconstructed images (visual and aural) of a supposedly poptastic life, Macdonald creates a vivid collage that juxtaposes public and personal spheres.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Jul 8, 2018

Kevin Macdonald's "Whitney" is a documentary chronicle of Whitney Houston's life; it's tough-minded, unsparing and far superior to the biopic and the nonfiction film that preceded it.

| Jul 6, 2018

Kevin Macdonald's electrifying and empathetic doc on Whitney Houston drops a shocking revelation about abuse- but if his look at how she fell apart shortchanges the range of her talent it is anything but sensationalistic,

| Original Score: 3.5/5 | Jul 6, 2018

For much of its two-hour running time, we watch the life slowly being sucked out of a legend; the last thirty-minutes are consumed by ineffability.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Jul 6, 2018

A well-done but all-too-woeful wallow of a documentary.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Jul 6, 2018

To see this documentary is to be in awe of her talent, and to bask in it.

| Original Score: 4/4 | Jul 6, 2018

It's all the Whitney Houston documentary you'll ever need - if you need one at all.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Jul 6, 2018

For all the domestic sturm und drang, it's the blossoming of Houston's musical sensibilities that most engages in the film.

| Jul 5, 2018

For most of Kevin Macdonald's film, Whitney Houston seems a guttering flame in a public crosswind, with only fleeting celebration given to the wildfire of her success.

| Original Score: 2.5/4 | Jul 5, 2018