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W.
Trailer . IMDB
Stone gives us key moments of hazing and failure, trial by fire and trial by father, and in the end arrives at a tremendous void. Maybe that's his point, but such a conclusion works better as a sendup of biopics than a dissection of the thought processes that led to a lengthy and expensive war.
Robert Davis
Daily Plastic
It is a questionable prospect to largely attribute the motivations of a president’s career, and especially the complex series of events leading to the Iraq war, to a man’s lifelong rivalry with his father, as Stone dares to do in W. Nonetheless, this thesis is consistent with Stone’s career-long obsession with the psychological traumas inflicted by fathers and other patriarchal figures (the military, the government) on their children.
Kevin B. Lee
Moving Image Source
Despite superficial ties to past work, however, his latest barely deserves mention in the same breath as JFK and Nixon, two monumental narrative and aesthetic achievements whose intricately constructed psychoanalytic investigations of Americans and America are here replaced by caricatures and Oedipal issues even more facile than those proffered by Alexander.
Nick Schager
Slant Magazine
Is W. a serious drama, or a nightmare comedy of power, privilege and parental friction played out on the global stage? I lean towards the latter, even if Stone plays his cards relatively close to the vest.... What started as parody and comedy builds to a haunting final moment thanks to Stone, Weiser and Brolin, and in W.'s final seconds it is not just George W. Bush who's waiting for the ball to drop, it is all of us.
James Rocchi
Cinematical
Oliver Stone’s sincere, willfully myopic portrait of our sitting president is a maddening experience that for many will be akin, on the what’s-the-point scale, to Gus Van Sant’s Psycho remake.
Nicolas Rapold
The L Magazine
Other than an overwrought Oedipal relationship between George W. Bush and his father, Stone and screenwriter Stanley Weiser don't have a strong, coherent take on the man.... Always a "big picture" kind of guy, Stone paddles down the giant river of Bush's life without exploring any of the tributaries; he passes by two or three dozen better movies along the way.
Scott Tobias
Onion AV Club
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