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Critic Reviews

The film has a vicious edge that the Marx Brothers didn't have, and it's too low-minded to achieve their enchanting blend of anarchy and surrealism.

-David DenbyFull Review

Now [Cohen is] turning material both fresh and rancid into tepid gruel.

-Joe MorgensternFull Review

On the laughmeter The Dictator is closer to Borat than to the misfired Bruno, which is to say it's funny for about half of its brisk 83 minutes.

-Peter RainerFull Review

Most of The Dictator had me neither laughing nor shocked, but just staring at the screen in anxious is-that-all-there-is? silence.

-Dana StevensFull Review

A bit scattershot and schticky, the film never quite settles into a consistent comic rhythm. Yet for fans of Baron Cohen's work there are plenty of moments of crass hilarity.

-Christopher OrrFull Review

For the most part, the movie's rhythms feel slightly off -- there are long stretches without a laugh -- and there is a mean-spirited air to the whole thing.

-Randy CordovaFull Review

The Dictator starts at outrageous and rockets on from there. Screw the occasional sputter.

-Peter TraversFull Review

The Dictator is loose and slap-happy and full of sharp political barbs and has funny actors moving in and out - and at a lickety-split 83 minutes, it doesn't wear out its welcome.

-David EdelsteinFull Review

Sacha Baron Cohen's third starring feature, and the first to be fully scripted, is sharp as a scimitar in one scene and wobbly in the next, but it's unfailingly audacious.

-Colin CovertFull Review

For once, Baron Cohen has a real script and a supporting cast as skilled at improv as he is. And those complementary elements make a difference.

-Stephen WhittyFull Review

Directed by Cohen's longtime collaborator Larry Charles, The Dictator mixes its high and low comedy with surprising success.

-Steven ReaFull Review

It reasserts Baron Cohen as a comic force who can't be ignored, dedicated to pushing the envelope and working with real ideas.

-Tom LongFull Review

It ends up being a lot less hilarious than "Borat,'' and not quite as funny as "Bruno.''

-Lou LumenickFull Review

Although the character of Aladeen seems awfully predictable by Baron Cohen standards, the movie itself veers from one hilarious, absurd and patently offensive setup to the next...

-Andrew O'HehirFull Review

Baron Cohen's demonstrations of political ''outrageousness'' feel all too canned, planned, and defanged.

-Lisa SchwarzbaumFull Review

While tastelessness is rampant and the humor uneven, The Dictator also has its moments of slyly clever satire.

-Claudia PuigFull Review

By turns hysterical, heretical, guilty, innocent, silly, sophisticated, teasing and tedious.

-Betsy SharkeyFull Review

Even in its manufactured boundary-pushing-a flash of full-frontal Baron Cohen, another scene set partially inside a birth canal-The Dictator never really risks anything.

-Karina LongworthFull Review

This isn't the last word on cinematic send-ups of totalitarianism -- for that, we still have Charlie Chaplin's The Great Dictator -- but it's a fine and riotous jab in the ribs.

-Amy BiancolliFull Review

One of the cleverest moments in Sacha Baron Cohen's The Dictator comes during the first five seconds: a memorial dedication to Kim Jong Il. It's all downhill from there.

-James BerardinelliFull Review

Cohen and Charles deserve kudos for departing from their usual formula of setting Cohen's crazed characters loose in the real world.

-Melinda Sue GordonFull Review

Potential is mostly squandered in "The Dictator," which gestures halfheartedly toward topicality and, with equal lack of conviction, toward pure, anarchic silliness.

-A.O. ScottFull Review

Cohen is actually Chaplin's antithesis, a first-world bully content to target the Other.

-J. R. JonesFull Review

[A] hugely offensive, outrageously funny farce.

-Rafer GuzmanFull Review

The easily offended will be appalled. The rarely offended may be appalled. But they'll have to stop laughing long enough to realize it.

-Elizabeth WeitzmanFull Review

Terrorism and torture, anti-Semitism and pedophilia, onanism and armpit hair: They're all grist for the comic mill in Sacha Baron Cohen's latest assault on moviegoers' funny bones.

-Soren AndersonFull Review

Never achieves the stinging parodic heights of Cohen's Borat movie, but manages a better batting average than his most recent misfire, Bruno.

-Ann HornadayFull Review

Cohen and Charles offer a lot of admittedly witty observations, but they don't build into anything bigger or smarter. They're too broad.

-Wesley MorrisFull Review

The Dictator does for Sacha Baron Cohen what The Love Guru did for Mike Myers.

-Rene RodriguezFull Review

If nothing here offends you, take a bow on behalf of your stout constitution. If nothing here makes you laugh, you might need to loosen up a tad.

-Chris VognarFull Review


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