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Positive:
16
Mixed:
11
Negative:
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Critic Reviews
Uncle BarkyJul 1, 2019
Season 1 Review:
Riveting at the start and somewhat less so as time marches on. Crowe’s portrayal of Ailes of course is the major drawing card, and he is nothing if not fully immersed. The characters around him can’t help but pale in comparison, but it would help if some of the supporting roles were more vividly acted.
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Jun 27, 2019
Season 1 Review:
It all seems so ridiculous until you remember we lived through it. At times, “Loudest Voice” plays like a white collar version of “The Sopranos,” as when Ailes orders his PR guy and fixer Brian Smith (Seth MacFarlane, “The Orville”) to take care of a leaker. Crowe, covered in mostly great prosthetics and looking as if he is wearing a fat suit that ate another fat suit, wheezes with every waddle and authentically underplays a human volcano.
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Jul 1, 2019
Season 1 Review:
It’s a pungent profile of a nauseating figure. ... “The Loudest Voice” sees the behind-the-scenes culture of sexual assault and the onscreen show of Barnum-ized reactionaryism as two curves of the same lens, which is trained on America and not necessarily opposed to airing anything, especially if it did strong numbers in the demo.
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Jun 28, 2019
Season 1 Review:
A premiere scripted by Spotlight writer-director Tom McCarthy (also an executive producer) sets a talky, thoughtful tone for a saga that needs no embellishment. ... Crowe, a world-class bellower, only occasionally flips the switch from whispery, methodical creepiness to full-on scenery chomping. The result is an elegant mix of character study, workplace drama and political thriller.
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Jun 28, 2019
Season 1 Review:
The Loudest Voice blends West Wing-style operatics with a darker narrative about power most corrupting those who were already corrupt, and if it lacks Sorkin’s gift for whip-crack pacing, its excellent cast and dependable focus on the machinations of backroom deals keeps it fleet and engaging.
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Jun 26, 2019
Season 1 Review:
The result is a slick, well-made, engrossing, at times borderline pulp biopic, highlighted by a ferocious, screen-filling and appropriately theatrical performance by a nearly unrecognizable Russell Crowe, who all but disappears under the makeup and prosthetics and padding as the conniving, scheming, duplicitous, combative and intimidating Ailes.
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Jun 28, 2019
Season 1 Review:
The series begins as full-steam-ahead entertainment, an Aaron Sorkin–ish explication of history, in which the past plays out with the buzzwords of the future. ... It’s packaged as a biopic and not some larger condemnation of “our times.” As I watched it, I kept wondering if something so relatively understated that aspires—unlike Ailes—to come across as relatively unbiased was too subtle for the world that Ailes created.
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Jun 27, 2019
Season 1 Review:
Ailes’ now-infamous skulduggery may have irrevocably damaged political discourse, but recounting it all makes for a wildly entertaining, occasionally painful, deep dive into the history of Fox News Channel and an excavation of one of the ways the current polarized American political climate came to exist.
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TV Guide MagazineJun 20, 2019
Season 1 Review:
As portrayed with ferocious bluster by Russell Crowe in an astonishing makeup transformation rivaling Christian Bale's in Vice, Ailes is shown to be a cunning glutton for power and control. ... Compelling adaptation. [24 Jun - 7 Jul 2019, p.11]
IndieWireJun 25, 2019
Season 1 Review:
Oddly enough given the title, “The Loudest Voice” starts to feel less revealing and more salacious when it abandons nuance for loud noises. Not only is Crowe’s work more affecting during the all-too-brief moments studying Ailes’ origins, psyche, and internal motivations, but the show is, as well.
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Jun 21, 2019
Season 1 Review:
Crowe is excellent as Ailes; the actor all but disappears inside his synthetic girth, and he toggles effectively between Ailes’ avuncular charm and apoplectic rage. ... After three episodes, I found myself wishing the show had approached Ailes’ story from a different perspective, one that might offer fresh insight — Carlson’s, perhaps, or better yet, that of the mysterious gatekeeper Laterza. But The Loudest Voice isn’t really interested in learning anything from Ailes’ history — it’s simply content to repeat it.
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Jun 27, 2019
Season 1 Review:
The seven-episode miniseries, four episodes of which were made available to critics, is steadily entertaining, as it tracks Ailes from 1995 to the end of his life in 2017. ... But “The Loudest Voice” becomes a simplistic and obvious anatomy of Fox News. Too much of the dialogue in the script, whose writers include “Spotlight” director Tom McCarthy, doubles as fuel on the fire, with little dramatic purpose.
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Jun 27, 2019
Season 1 Review:
The Loudest Voice seems more intent on probing the political and sociological impact of Fox News than the ferociously complicated psychology of the man who created it. It’s a worthy mission, but it leaves the character at the center of the series at something of a distance.
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Jun 27, 2019
Season 1 Review:
[The Loudest Voice] is so focused on the who, what, when, and where of that story that it neglects to dig sufficiently into the why and how. The Loudest Voice is most interested in the surface of things ... Crowe certainly tackles the part with zeal and shows us sides of the man — including his occasional gentleness and his wiseass sense of humor — that make him something more complicated than a Republican villain. ... He does have to engage in another kind of battle, one between himself and the prosthetics applied to his face to make it appear more jowly.
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Jun 18, 2019
Season 1 Review:
When it's specific and detailed, capturing the depth of Sherman's reporting, it's perceptive and entertaining. ... Less successful are the grandstanding beats where Ailes walks into a situation controlled by some thinly written snowflake duck and makes a big speech dominated by Fox News talking points and then everybody claps at his insight and magnetism. Those are clunky and on-the-nose.
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Jun 13, 2019
Season 1 Review:
Engrossing but flawed. ...“The Loudest Voice” feels as though it has come way too late or much too soon. As a piece of current contextual storytelling, it struggles to provide the thematic platform that would make it more than a stylized Wikipedia entry. As a hit job, it comes on too strong, given that its subject is dead and gone.
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The GuardianDec 3, 2019
Season 1 Review:
It cannot reconcile a well-honed expertise on the nuts and bolts of news with its rudimentary understanding of personality and behavior. Sketches of actual people have been inserted into an environment more realistic and detailed than they are, a contrast unflattering to Crowe’s floundering performance.
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Jun 26, 2019
Season 1 Review:
That the script can’t find an angle in on the “why” of Ailes and thus keeps on stating, more forcefully each time, the “what” holds Crowe back yet more. Small moments — as when, say, he tells his son about a moment of abuse in his childhood — come to feel like they must be “Rosebud” clues to crack the case of this Citizen Kane figure, if only because otherwise, his story has no dramatic energy, with endless indulgence replacing an arc.
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Jun 28, 2019
Season 1 Review:
Unalloyed caricature of a political biography. ... Some filmmaker may one day undertake the story of Roger Ailes, Fox News, the rise of the
modern Republican Party and the presidency of Donald Trump and make it a worthy enterprise. Something that can’t be said of this series, which has all the nuance of a long rap sheet plus indictment in its predictability, its driving effort to establish its case—and which, like those tummlers of old, can leave an audience longing for the end of the act.
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Jun 24, 2019
Season 1 Review:
The Loudest Voice is a liberal bedtime story; it doesn’t argue a point or even particularly inform so much as blandly recreate the heinous actions of a Republican bogeyman. In doing so, it merely pacifies, assuring us that the world functions exactly as we expected while leaving us safe and secure in the knowledge that the monsters are exactly where we always knew they were.
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