Waltz with Bashir
Sony Pictures Classics | Release Date: December 25, 2008 CRITIC SCORE DISTRIBUTION
91
METASCORE
Universal acclaim based on 33 Critic Reviews
Positive:
32
Mixed:
1
Negative:
0
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Critic Reviews

Critic scorePublicationBy date
100
EmpireDan Jolin
A bravura documentary which balances the personal and the political as it peers into the First Lebanon War, its animated approach never feeling like a novelty. Astonishing, unforgettable: you have to see it. Read full review
90
NewsweekDavid Ansen
The images of war that Folman and his chief illustrator, David Polonsky, conjure up have a feverish, infernal beauty. Dreams and reality jumble together. Read full review
60
The Hollywood ReporterPeter Brunette
The chosen style of animation leads to a distracting choppiness that renders the movements, gestures and facial expressions of the interviewees unconvincing. The other problem is that, memory naturally being something that returns in fits and starts, the film is rarely able to sustain any consistent narrative thrust. Read full review
80
VarietyLeslie Felperin
It's these surreal touches, deployed with tactical restraint, that make the picture extraordinary and convey the febrile atmosphere of warfare, where by fear, horror -- and later guilt -- distort and distend perception and memory. Read full review
88
Rolling StonePeter Travers
Get ready to be knocked for a loop. Read full review
80
New York Daily NewsElizabeth Weitzman
This animated documentary, from former Israeli soldier Ari Folman, blends both tactics to devastating effect. Perhaps only animation could give us the distance that makes his subject bearable: the personal cost of his own participation in the 1982 Lebanon War. Read full review
80
Village VoiceJ. Hoberman
Ari Folman's broodingly original Waltz With Bashir -- one of the highlights of the last New York Film Festival -- is a documentary that seems only possible, not to mention bearable, as an animated feature. Read full review
75
The A.V. ClubTasha Robinson
The trouble with Bashir's extraordinary technique is that it lacks the confrontational realism of live footage; the extreme stylization of the animation can be distancing, making it hard to relate the images to real events and people. But that's also part of Folman's point. Read full review
100
Los Angeles TimesKenneth Turan
Provocative, hallucinatory, incendiary, this devastating animated documentary is unlike any Israeli film you've seen. More than that, in its seamless mixing of the real and the surreal, the personal and the political, animation and live action, it's unlike any film you've seen, period. Read full review
100
Wall Street JournalJoe Morgenstern
An absolute stunner, a feature-length animated documentary, from Israel, in which the force of moving drawings amplifies eerily powerful accounts of war, shaky remembrance and rock-solid repression. Read full review
90
SalonAndrew O'Hehir
The results, in my judgment, are stunning...and at certain moments during the film I wondered whether I had myself fallen asleep and was dreaming its hellish, haunted images. Read full review
75
The Globe and Mail (Toronto)Rick Groen
Profound, and profoundly affecting. Read full review
90
The New York TimesA.O. Scott
A memoir, a history lesson, a combat picture, a piece of investigative journalism and an altogether amazing film. Read full review
88
New York PostLou Lumenick
Haunting is the best word for Waltz With Bashir, a striking animated documentary - not an oxy moron, despite how it sounds - from Israel. Read full review
100
New York Magazine (Vulture)David Edelstein
It has taken an animated film to go where live-action dramas and even documentaries haven't--to tickle our synapses and slip into our bloodstream. Read full review
80
The New YorkerAnthony Lane
Ari Folman, the director of Waltz with Bashir, has made a movie so unusual that it overflows any box in which you try to contain it. Call it an adult psycho-documentary combat cartoon and you're halfway there. Read full review
100
Entertainment WeeklyLisa Schwarzbaum
Waltz With Bashir has transcended the definitions of ''cartoon'' or ''war documentary'' to be classified as its own brilliant invention. Read full review
100
San Francisco ChronicleJonathan Curiel
The best movie of 2008? The most revealing war film ever made? The greatest animated feature to come out of Israel? All these descriptions could apply to Waltz With Bashir. Read full review
100
Christian Science MonitorPeter Rainer
Waltz With Bashir is a supremely courageous act, not only as a piece of filmmaking, but much more so as a moral testament. Read full review
80
Film ThreatScott Mendelson
The tragic, violent true-life tale that concerns Waltz with Bashir is rendered even more powerful in animated form than it would likely have in life-action. Read full review
88
Boston GlobeTy Burr
Waltz With Bashir not only breathes but it howls - and sobs and curses and croons and, in the end, when sound proves useless in the face of calamity, falls into awful silence. Read full review
88
Chicago Sun-TimesRoger Ebert
Folman is an Israeli documentarian who has not worked in animation. Now he uses it as the best way to reconstruct memories, fantasies, hallucinations, possibilities, past and present. This film would be nearly impossible to make any other way. Read full review
100
Chicago TribuneMichael Phillips
It is personal filmmaking of the highest order, recognized with an Academy Award nomination for best foreign film. Read full review
100
Philadelphia InquirerCarrie Rickey
This psycho-thriller, a Golden Globe winner and presumptive favorite for the foreign-film Oscar, itself is revelatory. Read full review
75
USA TodayClaudia Puig
This is a powerful, poignant and provocative film, told in an unconventional and effective fashion. Read full review
88
Miami HeraldRene Rodriguez
Waltz With Bashir isn't only a harrowing anti-war plea, it is also an eloquent and deeply moving argument that it is critical to never forget human atrocity, lest the past be repeated. Read full review
80
Chicago ReaderAndrea Gronvall
Animation may be the ideal medium for replicating dreams, and in this unsettling feature by Ari Folman it also proves well suited to autobiography. Read full review
100
Washington PostJohn Anderson
A thinking person's horror movie, about real horror and horrifying echoes: The parallels between the Holocaust and the massacres are pronounced. Read full review
100
Seattle Post-IntelligencerSean Axmaker
What begins as an introspective odyssey examining the effects of war on the young Israeli soldiers turns into a provocative exposé on the Sabra and Shatila massacre. Read full review
91
Portland OregonianShawn Levy
The film ends on an absolutely sick-making note, with live-action footage of the massacre and its aftermath. Read full review
100
Baltimore SunMichael Sragow
Views war from the inside out and the outside in. It carries the shock of full disclosure. Read full review
100
Charlotte ObserverLawrence Toppman
It's encouraging to see a nation so aware of its public image and defensive about its military decisions examine a dark day in its history. Read full review
89
Austin ChronicleMarc Savlov
Be forewarned: Folman closes his film with a grisly, real-death denouement that may give you some nightmares of your own. As well it should. Read full review
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