Hugh Hefner: Playboy, Activist and Rebel: Critic Reviews

A pop history lesson that holds you, but it's no deeper than an E! True Hollywood Story.

The film is too busy promoting St. Hugh to offer serious discussion of his life.

This is not a probing examination of Hef in all his complexity.

Te Hugh Hefner in this movie is Thomas Paine, Martin Luther King Jr., Mohandas Gandhi and William Kunstler all rolled into one.

Does Hugh Hefner own a pair of jeans? It's a question that misses the point of the Hefner experience. But it's the sort of thing you leave Brigitte Berman's fawning new Hefner documentary wondering.

A worthy topic, but it's bypassed for a familiar culture-wars narrative.

He may be something of a punch line nowadays, but Hugh Hefner was once a genuine force for social change, and this lively, candid doc reclaims the controversial and charming magazine and lifestyle mogul as a piece of living history.

Hefner's Playboy Foundation fought for civil liberties in general. The cost for these activities came out of his profits, and that didn't give him a moment's pause.

Even after 124 minutes of praise he still seems like a sad bastard.

A studiously airbrushed portrait of its subject, this obsequious biography of Hugh Hefner highlights his undeniable and important good works, while skirting any serious effort at context or psychological insight.

Berman's goal was to reveal "the other side of Hugh Hefner that had not yet been portrayed in any of the prior documentaries about him." In that context, the film's balance is appropriate; considered in a vacuum, however, it is almost a canonization.

This fawning docu goes to lengths to portray the octogenarian Playboy magazine founder as among the greatest figures of 20th-century American popular culture, while only cursorily acknowledging his status as a pioneering softcore pornographer.

Like a half-naked Playmate, there are a few tantalizing glimpses but no real reveal of Hefner.

As silly and gendered as his boy-fantasy sexual revolution looks in the rear-view mirror, it both sparked and signaled a prodigious sea change in American mores.

A revealing portrait of the freedom-fighting man beneath the silk pajamas.

An involving look at an American icon as well as an adept snapshot of our national zeitgeist from the McCarthy era through the Reagan years.

There are few people who can be credited with affecting real or lasting change in our culture. One of them is Hugh Hefner, an aspiring cartoonist who borrowed money to put...

More of a pat on the back than a true examination of the man inside the robe.

Definitely worth a look.

The Playboy empire unabashedly lined up with liberal causes, bringing messages of racial tolerance, resistance to the military-industrial complex, and anti-Puritanism into bedrooms all over America.

Those who consider Hefner a man who made fortunes by exploiting women in his magazine should find no reason to change their minds after watching this fascinating, illuminating document of America during a time of profound change.

To put it mildly, the doc is way more than just T&A , Bunnies and centerfolds. Although there's some of that too.

The film humanizes Hefner in a way no one has attempted to do before on the big screen.

This eye-opening documentary reveals the mensch beneath the moolah, the ardent social reformer beneath the paisley-patterned shirts.