Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry
Sundance Selects | Release Date: July 27, 2012 CRITIC SCORE DISTRIBUTION
81
METASCORE
Universal acclaim based on 28 Critic Reviews
Positive:
24
Mixed:
4
Negative:
0
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Critic Reviews

Critic scorePublicationBy date
75
Miami HeraldRene RodriguezAug 16, 2012
The best artists - the ones whose work endures and matters and changes the world - are often troublemakers who challenge the status quo. Out of their defiance comes art. Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry, director Alison Klayman's riveting documentary of the esteemed Chinese sculptor/painter/iconoclast, is practically a handbook on social rebellion. Read full review
88
Philadelphia InquirerTirdad DerakhshaniAug 9, 2012
Ai Weiwei comes off as a man on a singular mission: to record the life around him before it is erased or distorted by a repressive government terrified by the smallest sign of nonconformity. His primary weapons: video cameras and Twitter. Read full review
90
Arizona RepublicKerry LengelAug 9, 2012
The metaphor is plain yet elegant: Ai is the clever cat busily devising ways to push through the barriers physical, cultural, mental -- that make humans less than free. And in China, of course, the biggest of those barriers is the one-party state. Read full review
78
Austin ChronicleStaff (Not credited)Aug 8, 2012
The documentary is as much a rallying cry for freedom of expression as it is a portrait in progress of an artist whose career is ongoing. Though we might wish for more insight or explanation, Klayman's film remains an incredible document of a courageous individual who the Chinese officials would prefer to make disappear. Read full review
60
EmpireDavid ParkinsonAug 6, 2012
Klayman exploits the opportunity to follow a man at the eye of a cultural and political storm, although more detail on his creative process and private life would have welcome. Read full review
90
Los Angeles TimesKenneth TuranAug 5, 2012
Watching Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry is like experiencing a thrilling unfinished symphony: The story is enthralling, but it's not over, and there's no telling where it's going. Which makes what we see on screen all the more involving. Read full review
75
Washington PostMichael O'SullivanAug 2, 2012
The only artwork by Ai that Klayman's film dwells on at any length -- aside from the iconic "bird's nest" stadium he helped design for the Beijing Olympics, and then denounced as tasteless -- is "Sunflower Seeds." Created for a 2010 exhibition at London's Tate Modern, the installation featured 100 million hand-painted ceramic sunflower seeds spread out on the floor. Read full review
83
Portland OregonianShawn LevyAug 2, 2012
You come away with an appreciation of the abstraction, scale and daring of Ai's art and, even more, a sense of the living man in his courage, humor and restlessness. It's an invigorating experience. Read full review
100
Boston GlobeTy BurrAug 2, 2012
Alison Klayman's documentary is one of the most engagingly powerful movies of the year almost completely on the strength of Ai's rumpled charisma and the confusion it creates in the bureaucratic mindset of the Chinese Communist Party. Read full review
80
Total FilmJames MottramJul 30, 2012
The finale, as Ai's Twitter tirades lead to a serious human-rights breach, will make your blood boil. Read full review
90
SalonAndrew O'HehirJul 28, 2012
Klayman's riveting, vérité-style film captures this burly, bigger-than-life figure over the past three years, as his activism has heightened, his art has grown increasingly confrontational and he has deliberately blurred the distinction between aesthetics and politics. Read full review
83
Christian Science MonitorPeter RainerJul 28, 2012
The title captures the man. He makes no apologies. Read full review
80
Boxoffice MagazineSara Maria VizcarrondoJul 28, 2012
Journalist and director Allison Klayman doesn't mask her awe of the man, who comes off as a cross between a wise Buddha-figure and Santa Claus - he's made for history, and he's making it. Read full review
75
New York PostV.A. MusettoJul 27, 2012
Ai is his country's most celebrated avant-garde artist - he's had shows around the world, including in New York, where he lived as a student - and China's most outspoken dissident. Read full review
75
The Globe and Mail (Toronto)Guy DixonJul 27, 2012
Yet the most startling scene in the film is when he returns home after confinement. He politely tells the journalists waiting outside his home studio that he is on bail and can not talk. He smiles and repeatedly declines to comment. It is utterly contrary to his true character. Read full review
85
NPRMark JenkinsJul 27, 2012
Ai is a great movie subject for many reasons, but one is that he understands the power of appearing larger than life on the silver screen. Read full review
75
San Francisco ChronicleKenneth BakerJul 26, 2012
Klayman has already shown us Ai challenging the authorities on various fronts, most grippingly in a confrontation with the Chengdu police officer who had given him a potentially fatal head injury. Read full review
91
The PlaylistGabe ToroJul 26, 2012
'Never Sorry' feels borderline unfinished, as it never draws that line between Ai Weiwei and the generation of successors to his throne that he has inspired. Perhaps it doesn't have to. Perhaps you're already one of them. Read full review
90
The New York TimesManohla DargisJul 26, 2012
The fluidity and convenience of digital moviemaking tools explain some of its freshness, as does Ms. Klayman's history as a budding documentarian. It's clear from watching both the feature and its earlier iterations that, while she was learning about Mr. Ai, she was also learning how to tell a visual story. It's easy to think that hanging around Mr. Ai, a brilliant Conceptual artist and an equally great mass-media interpolater, played a part in her education. Read full review
80
Wall Street JournalJoe MorgensternJul 26, 2012
His is a special kind of courage, and it impels him to act with special agility in a brave new world of his own making, where little tweets can challenge big lies and a blog post can echo like thunder. Read full review
60
New York Daily NewsElizabeth WeitzmanJul 26, 2012
Alison Klayman's chronicle of Chinese artist and activist Ai Weiwei is so straightforward that one can't help wishing the subject would make his own, more complex cinematic self-portrait. But for now, Klayman has provided a valuable introduction to a man everyone should know. Read full review
83
IndieWireEric KohnJul 26, 2012
Recently released from jail, Ai's full story remains to be told, but Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry competently summarizes his lasting relevance, regardless of what may happen next. Read full review
83
The A.V. ClubKeith PhippsJul 25, 2012
Klayman captures the earlier parts of that story so compellingly that the finale's "to be continued" quality ends up playing into the film's unspoken goal: raising awareness of one man's ongoing attempts to better the world through art. Read full review
100
Entertainment WeeklyOwen GleibermanJul 25, 2012
The Chinese artist and activist Ai Weiwei has achieved a prominence that makes him, in effect, the Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn of the Twitter age. He's also the least stuffy of dissidents, and Alison Klayman's stirring, important documentary catches his complex humanity. Read full review
60
Time OutKeith UhlichJul 24, 2012
Ai is a great subject for a documentary, and his charismatic certitude helps to offset Klayman's unfortunate inexperience behind the camera. Read full review
80
The GuardianAndrew PulverJul 23, 2012
Let's hope Klayman gets to make a sequel. Read full review
50
VarietyPeter DebrugeJul 23, 2012
The film is a good start, but such an important artist deserves a more rigorous portrait. Read full review
75
Slant MagazineAndrew SchenkerJul 23, 2012
The director's clear-minded approach allows her subject's more challenging aesthetic-political mix to shine through, even if it's at the inevitable expense of her own filmmaking proclivities. Read full review
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