5.0
out of 100
Metascore®Universal acclaim Based on a weighted average of all critic review scores.
A sample of reviews from critics across the country.
It's an apt title. As divisive as the issue has become, it's hard to deny the power of Guggenheim's lingering shots on these children, waiting on a superhero who isn't going to come.
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Exhilarating, heartbreaking and righteous, Waiting for Superman is also a kind of high-minded thriller: Can the American education system be cured?
This is a time when urgent issues are often explored in polemic documentaries, as well as a fateful moment when the future of public education is being debated with unprecedented intensity. Waiting for 'Superman' makes an invaluable addition to the debate.
Powerful, passionate, and potentially revolution-inducing documentary.
Much of the film is told compellingly and heartbreakingly through the wide-eyed innocence of five children.
By showing how fiercely dedicated idealists are making a difference, it is a call to arms.
Guggenheim, contends the American educational system is failing, which we have been told before. He dramatizes this failure in a painfully direct way, says what is wrong, says what is right.
A moving and effective film whose subject may lack the hot-button boxoffice appeal of the director's "An Inconvenient Truth" but is at least a crisis practically everyone agrees actually exists.
Guggenheim's insistence on not engaging with the injustices that children of certain races and classes face outside of school makes his reiteration of the obvious-that "past all the noise and the debate, nothing will change without great teachers"-seem all the more willfully nave.
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Movies.com Critic
A horror movie about public education.
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