Cinema Verite
  • Network: HBO
  • Series Premiere Date: Apr 23, 2011
Metascore
74

Generally favorable reviews - based on 23 Critic Reviews

Critic score distribution:
  1. Positive: 14 out of 23
  2. Mixed: 9 out of 23
  3. Negative: 0 out of 23

Critic Reviews

  1. Time
    Reviewed by: James Poniewozik
    Apr 25, 2011
    60
    Cinema Verite is not a bad movie at all but its failing is an ironic one: it smooths out the messiness and non sequiturs of real life to fit its story into a neat feature-film arc.
  2. Washington Post
    Reviewed by: Hank Stuever
    Apr 25, 2011
    60
    An intriguing but often clumsy new movie about the making of the TV show.
  3. Slate
    Reviewed by: Troy Patterson
    Apr 22, 2011
    60
    It plays, for better and worse, like a slightly elevated version of one of those issue-of-the-week telefilms of the old school, with their teen traumas and kitchen-sink melodramas.
  5. New York Daily News
    Reviewed by: David Hinckley
    Apr 22, 2011
    60
    As the Loud family fractures and then reunites to fight back against their critics, Cinema Verite settles into melodrama that Lane's solid performance can only partly hold together.
  6. The New York Times
    Reviewed by: Alessandra Stanley
    Apr 21, 2011
    60
    Cinema Verite is a clever, beautifully made but somehow underwhelming re-enactment of the breakup of the Loud marriage, on camera and off.
  7. Los Angeles Times
    Reviewed by: Robert Lloyd
    Apr 22, 2011
    50
    As an attempt to tell the truth about an attempt to tell the truth about the state of domestic relations in a time of changing values, Cinema Verite fails--it cannot help but fail--as anything but a platform for some interesting performances and a few explicitly, loudly and briefly argued ideas about where one should draw the line when you point a camera into innocent people's lives.
  8. Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
    Reviewed by: Rob Owen
    Apr 22, 2011
    50
    Cinema Verite dramatizes the making of "An American Family," but it dwells too long on the setup and doesn't spend nearly enough time on the public response to the program and the impact that reaction (much of it negative) had on the Louds.
  9. Salon
    Reviewed by: Matt Zoller Seitz
    Apr 21, 2011
    50
    Cinema Verite is smart and often moving, but unsatisfying overall.
  10. Variety
    Reviewed by: Brian Lowry
    Apr 21, 2011
    50
    Cinema Verite harbors some merit, and is worth seeing if only for Lane. That said, it's a disappointingly shallow treatment considering the wealth of potential within the premise and period.