Reviews for this film from our members:
- Luke Bonanno @ DVDizzy.com
- Excerpt: While The Imposter may be a documentary, it has all the makings of a first-rate piece of fiction cinema: fascinating characters, creative visuals, an absolutely spellbinding plot, and heart-pounding suspense. All of those elements help this extraordinary work rival the best that contemporary film has to offer.
- Tim Brayton @ Antagony & Ecstasy
- Excerpt: A gripping thriller, heartbreaking family drama, and fascinating true-crime saga all in one package.
- Peter Canavese @ GrouchoReviews.com
- Excerpt: Stranger than fiction…simply by presenting us with the facts as they unfolded, Layton winningly encourages more questions than answers.
- Stephen Carty @ Flix Capacitor
- Laura Clifford @ Reeling Reviews
- Excerpt: Director Bart Layton owes a huge debt to Errol Morris, particularly “The Thin Blue Line,” for his approach to this incredible story.
- Rich Cline @ Shadows on the Wall
- Excerpt: Like Man on Wire and Tabloid, this narrative documentary plays out like a suspenseful thriller as it recounts an outrageously twisty true story
- Rich Cline @ Shadows on the Wall
- Excerpt: Reveals each jaw-dropping twist in the tale with maximum suspense value
- Edwin Davies @ A Mighty Fine Blog
- Excerpt: As the man at the centre of the story, [Federic] Bourdin emerges as a very cool customer, someone able to judge people and calmly manipulate them to his advantage[…] He’s like a compelling antihero who has stepped out of the pages of a crime novel; a Gallic Tom Ripley happily divulging every detail of his deception.
- Dustin Freeley @ Movies About Gladiators.com
- Excerpt: Following the story of missing Nicholas Barclay, The Imposter highlights some of our innate human attributes: the need to be loved, the desire to believe in humanity, and our tendency to deceive in order to survive.
- Cynthia Fuchs @ PopMatters
- Excerpt: Frédéric Bourdin suggests that his abuses by adults and abandonment by his parents explain his ongoing mendacities. But then, you might wonder, how much truth might he know or be able to tell?
- Susan Granger @ www.susangranger.com
- Excerpt: Strange and intriguing, searching for that elusive essence known as ‘the perfect truth.’
- [New – 2/14] | A.J. Hakari @ CineSlice
- Excerpt: …if a simple “wow” isn’t enough of an endorsement, I don’t know what is.
- Donald Levit @ ReelTalk Movie Reviews
- Piers Marchant @ Sweet Smell of Success
- Excerpt: A documentary which offers a charming portrait of a complete, raging sociopath.
- Bev Questad @ It’s Just Movies
- Excerpt: We believe lies all the time – from politicians, Fox News and sociopathic boyfriends. Like we learn in “Life of Pi,” lies can form a fabric that helps us live with the more traumatic truth. What this family worries might have happened to the real Nicholas is just that kind of nightmare.
- Tiago Ramos @ Split Screen [Portuguese]
- Jamie S. Rich @ Portland Mercury
- Excerpt: THE IMPOSTER is one of those too-strange-to-be-true tales that’s like manna for documentarians. In the early 1990s, 13-year-old Nicholas Barclay disappeared from his Texas home, only to turn up four years later in Madrid.
- Cole Smithey @ ColeSmithey.com
- Excerpt: That least mined of all film genres — the docudrama — finds full-throated expression in the service of a true story that is, as the saying goes, stranger than fiction.
- Frank Swietek @ One Guy’s Opinion
- Ron Wilkinson @ Monstersandcritics.com
- Excerpt: Truth that is undeniably stranger than fiction. A film that shows us that we may have found the enemy, and it may be us.
- George Zervopoulos @ Movies Ltd [Greek]
