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Waltz With BashirMovie Reviews

Poster art for "Waltz With Bashir."
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Metascore®91 out of 100 | Universal acclaim

Critic scores range from 0 to 100, with higher scores indicating more favorable reviews.

  • 100
    Chicago Tribune | Michael Phillips

    It is personal filmmaking of the highest order, recognized with an Academy Award nomination for best foreign film. Read full review

  • 100
    Wall Street Journal | Joe Morgenstern

    An absolute stunner, a feature-length animated documentary, from Israel, in which the force of moving drawings amplifies eerily powerful accounts of war, shaky remembrance and rock-solid repression. Read full review

  • 100
    Los Angeles Times | Kenneth Turan

    Provocative, hallucinatory, incendiary, this devastating animated documentary is unlike any Israeli film you've seen. More than that, in its seamless mixing of the real and the surreal, the personal and the political, animation and live action, it's unlike any film you've seen, period. Read full review

  • 100
    Entertainment Weekly | Lisa Schwarzbaum

    Waltz With Bashir has transcended the definitions of ''cartoon'' or ''war documentary'' to be classified as its own brilliant invention. Read full review

  • 90
    The New York Times | A.O. Scott

    A memoir, a history lesson, a combat picture, a piece of investigative journalism and an altogether amazing film. Read full review

  • 88
    Chicago Sun-Times | Roger Ebert

    Folman is an Israeli documentarian who has not worked in animation. Now he uses it as the best way to reconstruct memories, fantasies, hallucinations, possibilities, past and present. This film would be nearly impossible to make any other way. Read full review

  • 80
    Village Voice | J. Hoberman

    Ari Folman's broodingly original Waltz With Bashir -- one of the highlights of the last New York Film Festival -- is a documentary that seems only possible, not to mention bearable, as an animated feature. Read full review

  • 80
    Variety | Leslie Felperin

    It's these surreal touches, deployed with tactical restraint, that make the picture extraordinary and convey the febrile atmosphere of warfare, where by fear, horror -- and later guilt -- distort and distend perception and memory. Read full review

  • 75
    The Onion (A.V. Club) | Tasha Robinson

    The trouble with Bashir’s extraordinary technique is that it lacks the confrontational realism of live footage; the extreme stylization of the animation can be distancing, making it hard to relate the images to real events and people. But that’s also part of Folman’s point. Read full review

  • 75
    USA Today | Claudia Puig

    This is a powerful, poignant and provocative film, told in an unconventional and effective fashion. Read full review

Avg. Fan Rating:
Average Rating = 3.1 out of 5