Category: Review
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Raoul Peck’s New film on Orwell Warns Us What Comes Next
– Both Familiar and Terrifyingly Current – by Josh Rottenberg | Los Angeles Times | October 7, 2025 No one goes to Cannes expecting to be frightened by a film about a long-dead British writer. Unless, of course, that writer is George Orwell. When Raoul Peck’s documentary “Orwell: 2+2=5” premiered at the festival in May, the…
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Orwell: 2+2=5 Adds Up Everything Keeping You Awake at Night
– Damian Lewis: Warm Yet Resolute – by Jacob Oller | AV Club | October 3, 2025 Documentarian Raoul Peck cuts into our modern hell, using George Orwell as his scalpel. It’s hard to settle on which modern catastrophe will keep you up at night. Will it be the government cover-ups that lack the self-respect…
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Orwell: 2+2=5 Review – A Succinct Warning for What’s Already Here
– When Fiction is Fact – by Dan Mecca | The Film Stage | October 3, 2025 “From the totalitarian point of view, history is something to be created rather than learned,” George Orwell wrote in his 1946 essay “The Prevention of Literature.” Orwell: 2+2=5, the new documentary from Raoul Peck, serves as a stark reminder…
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Orwell: 2+2=5 Review – The Latest Documentary from Director Raoul Peck
– Powerful, Terrifying, and Unnerving – by Ross Bonaime | Collider | October 3, 2025 8 out of 10 stars At this point, it sometimes feels like a cliché or reductive to say that our modern world is like 1984, George Orwell’s classic dystopian novel released in 1949, or to say things have become “Orwellian.” But Orwell: 2…
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Orwell: 2+2=5 Review – How George Came to See the World as Orwellian
– Critic’s Pick – by Manohla Dargis | New York Times | October 2, 2025 His novel “1984” captured the tactics of totalitarianism back in 1949. A startling new documentary from Raoul Peck looks at Orwell’s life. “The opinion that art should have nothing to do with politics is itself a political attitude,” George Orwell…
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How Did a Documentary on George Orwell Become the Scariest Movie of 2025?
– Counteract Complicity – by David Fear | Rolling Stone Magazine | October 2, 2025 Raoul Peck’s Orwell: 2+2=5 looks at the writer who gave us a modern dystopian classic — and doubles as a portrait of how authoritarianism works that feels way too familiar. When he was 19 years old, still eons away from the essays,…
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Orwell: 2+2=5 – A Powerful Portrait of Author and His Still Relevant Writings
– 3 Out of 4 Stars – by Lindsey Bahr | Associated Press | October 1, 2025 Filmmaker Raoul Peck uses George Orwell’s writings to weave together a biographical portrait of the author and a dispiriting picture of power and truth in the modern world in “Orwell: 2+2=5.” He’s hardly the first to connect the dots between…
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The 14 Movies to Watch Out for This Fall
– An Incendiary Watch – by Shirley Li | The Atlantic | September 20, 2025 An existential thriller set in the middle of the Moroccan desert, a whodunit doubling as a crisis of faith, a musical about the founder of the Shaker movement—this year’s Toronto International Film Festival not only screened some of this fall’s…