Nixon: Critic Reviews

What it finally adds up to is a huge mixed bag of waxworks and daring, a film that is furiously ambitious even when it goes flat, and startling even when it settles for eerie, movie-of-the-week mimicry.

Joan Allen goes beyond her chilling physical resemblance to Pat Nixon toward serious Oscar worthiness.

Without question, Nixon dwarfs everything in the American cinema since Schindler's List.

You will not be bored.

Thoughts of Hamlet, Macbeth and King Lear come to mind; here, again, is a ruler destroyed by his fatal flaws. There's something almost majestic about the process: As Nixon goes down in this film, there is no gloating, but a watery sigh, as of a great ship

Thoughtful, well-researched and carefully modulated, the film also marks director Oliver Stone's coming of age.

Nixon far overstays its welcome with an increasingly tedious final hour devoted largely to slogging through the minutiae of Watergate.

I never felt that I was seeing the darkness reaching out to the darkness as Nixon was once described.

Casting Anthony Hopkins was a stroke of unexpected genius.

Stone's no Shakespeare, and neither are his screenwriters.

There's no compelling structure or viewpoint to hold the picture together.

Factual or not, there's no denying that Nixon has moments when it is nothing short of compelling.

Real life, if it's real Nixon, is more dramatic than an Oliver Stone movie.

Nixon starts, like a horror movie, on a dark and stormy night, with the president prowling around a room of the White House like Dracula in his lair.

Dense psychodrama of much-disliked U.S. president.

You could say that Nixon is Oliver Stone's Citizen Kane, and not necessarily mean it as praise.

The filmmaker's deftness at evoking theme and sentiment through editorial montages within individual dramatic scenes reaches an apotheosis here.

It's clear that Stone hates Nixon with a capital H.

A convincing blend of Shakespearean tragedy and Citizen Kane, Nixon paints the thirty-seventh President of the United States as a uniquely American tragic hero...[Blu-Ray]

Some of Nixon's scenes are standouts, but it's Hopkins' crazy rants that you won't forget.

The combination of Oliver Stone and Richard Nixon, two paranoids from opposite ends of the political spectrum, is a match made in cinematic heaven.

For all its unwieldy temporal scope and narrowness of perspective, Nixon is an amazingly graceful beast, flawed yet invigorating, packed with enough material that will fascinate and irk moviegoers of all stripes for quite a time to come.

A riveting tragedy.

A hulking tyrannosaur of a movie, lusty and fierce, crashing around for all the world to see, majestic in its size and scope though it's also an instant anachronism.