Metacritic reviews

W., a biography of President Bush, is fascinating. No other word for it.

You'll be disappointed if you expect famed leftist Oliver Stone to apply a coup de grace to this man.

A measured and thoughtful meditation on a leader who, this terrific movie believes, inadvertently made the world as roiling as his soul.

In the end it depicts its subject as lost, and pitiable--like Richard Nixon, but more a pawn than a dark knight.

Like all Stone movies, W. has energy and forward momentum--particularly in the pre-presidential sections, when Bush is in his loose-cannon phase. It's not boring, and Brolin is often remarkable.

The intrepid one is the outstanding Josh Brolin, who does such a phenomenal job in the title role that he carries every scene he's in to a place of subtlety and integrity far beyond what Stone needs to make his attention-grabbing noise.

It's a gutsy movie but not necessarily a good one. Its greatest strength is that it wants to talk about what's on our minds right now and not wait for historians.

For a film that could have been either a scorching satire or an outright tragedy, W. is, if anything, overly conventional, especially stylistically.

In our age of 24-hour news coverage, this rehashing of current events doesn't just come off familiar but completely unnecessary. And, worst of all, prosaic.

A painful movie to endure.