Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan: Critic Reviews

The people Borat talks to become the symbolic heart of America -- a place where intolerance is worn, increasingly, with pride.

The brilliance of Borat is that its comedy is as pitiless as its social satire, and as brainy.

The more I think about the film, the less amusing it becomes.

In an era of stale, formulaic comedies, this uproarious and ribald faux documentary is like a hit of pure oxygen.

A perfect combination of slapstick and satire that manages to appeal to our basest common denominators while brilliantly skewering racism, anti-Semitism, sexism and that peculiarly American affliction: we're-number-one-ism.

A comic put-on of awe-inspiring crudity and death-defying satire and by a long shot the funniest film of the year. It is Jackass with a brain and Mark Twain with full frontal male nudity.

Indeed, the man who invented Borat is a masterful improviser, brilliant comedian, courageous political satirist, and genuinely experimental film artist. Borat makes you laugh but Baron Cohen forces you to think.

Put on two pairs of underwear and try to stay dry through one of the most uproariously -- or, in the case of the nude wrestling scene between Borat and his morbidly obese producer, disgustingly -- funny movies in a very long time.

Borat may be dangerous to abdominal health; there must be a limit to how many convulsions a belly can take without trauma.

Expect to laugh uproariously; expect to choke back horror and revulsion, often at yourself.

In the words of the man himself, Borat is Big Success.

I highly recommend Borat to anyone like myself with zero emotional I.Q., those with a thick skin for when former friends decide you're a moron by association, and the wise people who believe that Jackass was shafted for the 2002 Oscar.

[Borat] is equipped, like an F-15 Eagle, to engage multiple targets at once.

As the man from Kazakhstan likes to say: Great success!

As clever as he is crude, Cohen alchemizes bad-taste comedy into Strangelovean satire.

Borat leaves no ethnicity, no religious or social order (well, maybe one or two) unmocked. Both the glorious U.S. and A. and the beautiful Kazakhstan get pilloried by Baron Cohen and his sublimely silly, unapologetically offensive shtick.

Conceptually brilliant and fearlessly executed, it rewrites the rules of screen comedy, presenting something never before seen on film: a gene-splice of Andy Kaufman's high-wire character humor and caught-on-the-street pranks from Punk'd.

Borat packs all the intellectual punch of the standard pack of ultra-serious Oscar hopefuls. Plus it makes you laugh until your lungs hurt. And that's why it's one of the best movies of the year.

The trailer makes Borat seem like a harmless farce, but the movie is among the most offensive ever made. And among the funniest.

The theory of comedy here is that you can get away with almost anything if you manage to make your target audience feel superior to the human beings being mocked on the screen.

Uproariously funny.

This is the finest and most thoughtful comedy released so far this century.

Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan is as fearless as mockumentaries get.

Somewhere in standup comedy heaven Andy Kaufman is smiling. Possibly even busting a gut.

When Borat is good, it's very, very good, and when it's bad, it's box-office gold.