87
Metascore
22 reviews · Provided by Metacritic.com
- 100VarietyNick SchagerVarietyNick SchagerIt’s an investigation into memory, intolerance, corporate-labor conflicts and race relations that’s as audacious as it is timely — and further confirms that director Robert Greene is one of America’s finest new voices in nonfiction.
- 90The New YorkerRichard BrodyThe New YorkerRichard BrodyWith microcosms of microcosms and reflections of reflections, Greene offers a passionately ambitious, patiently empathetic mapping of modern times.
- 90Bisbee ’17 is a fierce, lyrical probe into the soul of a town haunted by a history it would rather forget. It’s also an unsettling cipher for America, in a year when the ghosts of our past revealed themselves in frightening ways.
- 90Village VoiceBilge EbiriVillage VoiceBilge EbiriThe director purposefully pulls us this way and that, weaving cinematic spells and then yanking us out of them; as viewers, we are both inside and outside the story.
- 90The New York TimesA.O. ScottThe New York TimesA.O. ScottEven though Bisbee ’17 depicts a wholesome and harmonious community undertaking, it is a profoundly haunted and haunting film. What we are witnessing is not the commemoration of a past disaster but its reanimation. Every important thing this movie is about is still alive.
- 88RogerEbert.comMatt Zoller SeitzRogerEbert.comMatt Zoller SeitzBisbee '17 is also about the artifice of storytelling and the alchemy of acting, and that magic moment when we decide to forget that we're seeing performers pretending to be long-dead people.
- 83The Film StageDaniel SchindelThe Film StageDaniel SchindelBisbee ’17 collapses past and present into one another, and in doing so achieves a singularly strange and unsettling vision of apparently intractable American hatreds.
- 83IndieWireDavid EhrlichIndieWireDavid EhrlichThe result is a singularly American riff on “The Act of Killing,” a fascinating and dream-like mosaic that’s less driven by residual anger than by cockeyed concern, less interested in exhuming the past than in revealing its value to the present.
- 80The Hollywood ReporterSheri LindenThe Hollywood ReporterSheri LindenGreene is concerned with Western mythology and the interplay of past and present in Bisbee's self-dramatization. His intense focus on individuals can feel limiting in terms of the overall truth-and-reconciliation dynamic, but it also leads to some powerful moments. And the story's contemporary resonance couldn't be clearer.
- 75The A.V. ClubMike D'AngeloThe A.V. ClubMike D'AngeloThis one transforms practically the whole of Bisbee into a memorably uneasy amateur theatrical production.