| Focus Features | Release Date: July 16, 2021 | CRITIC SCORE DISTRIBUTION | ||
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Positive:
36
Mixed:
3
Negative:
0
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Critic Reviews
Jun 11, 2021
Jul 27, 2021
While Roadrunner is a love letter to Bourdain and a nostalgic watch for all of us who thought we saw something of ourselves in him, it’s also a comment on our inability to truly know anyone else. In that sense, it’s a fitting tribute to its subject, a man who tried assiduously not to present himself as someone who had all the answers.
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Jul 15, 2021
For two hours it places Bourdain’s voice alongside the voices of those who knew him, as if they were still able to converse on the same spiritual plane. There’s beauty and solace in that illusion, even if the movie can’t — and maybe shouldn’t — begin to answer the unbearably sad question that haunts every frame.
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Jul 15, 2021
Those who are familiar with Bourdain from No Reservations or Parts Unknown will appreciate the opportunity to peer through the different facets of Neville’s prism. Those who don’t know Bourdain from Emeril Lagasse may not find Roadrunner as compelling but are likely to enjoy the warts-and-all approach employed by Neville in examining Bourdain’s life.
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Jul 16, 2021
Roadrunner may have been made too soon, and made with a misguided approach in mind, but in its closing moments, it manages a sudden magnificence in affirming that there’s no right way to mourn. Grief, in all of its ugly reality, is a part of life too, and there’s no tidying it up for the camera.
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Jul 16, 2021
You do not need a documentary to prove that the tour guide of No Reservations and Parts Unknown contained multitudes. Any viewer could see him mature and mellow out, or at the very least become more meditative, as seasons progressed. But Roadrunner, Neville’s portrait of the late, beloved Bourdain, would like to give those other sides a bit more screen time.
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Jul 14, 2021
In truth, this isn’t a movie about understanding why—a question that desperately wants an easy answer to a complicated problem—but about understanding Bourdain. Appreciating him. Mourning him. To that end, Roadrunner succeeds once the mythologizing dies down and we see the person inside the romantic.
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Jun 11, 2021
I’m much more comfortable with Roadrunner as a portrait of an evolving, complicated, tragic TV personality, and as one of the best behind-the-scenes glimpses of a TV show (or shows) I’ve ever seen, than I am with it as an attempt to make sense of a man who, for whatever reason, no longer wanted to continue living.
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Jul 14, 2021
In terms of celebrating his life by letting us soak in his impassioned, inspiring presence one more time, the film is successful. But viewers should take one more note from the man himself and not fall for easy scapegoats and trite narratives, whether they concern countries or a person who devoted his life to exploring them.
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Jul 20, 2021
The documentary is a mere encyclopedia-like info-product, which reduces its rich audiovisual archival material and its heartfelt interviews with people who knew and loved Bourdain to freeze-dried sound and image bites. It hardly deserves the attention it’s received—and Neville’s audio stunt, far from marring the film, merely serves as a brazen form of self-promotional publicity.
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