Critic Reviews

• Mark Feeney, Boston Globe

  The film's basic premise -- why can't politics be a reasonable, logical enterprise (like, say, making an indie documentary?) -- is at odds with the realities not just of the American political process but also human nature.

• Michael O'Sullivan, Washington Post

  It jumps around from California to Texas to Iowa to Louisiana and back, quite literally all over the map, with lots of numbingly repetitive cartographic visuals.

• Stephen Holden, New York Times

  An illustrated civics lesson that strains to make its complicated, shadowy subject -- electoral redistricting -- a political hot topic.

• Gary Goldstein, Los Angeles Times

  Maybe the whole topic is just too esoteric to warrant feature-length dissection without a craftier firebrand like Michael Moore at the helm.

• , San Francisco Chronicle

  While the film adopts a sometimes jaunty tone, the fact is that gerrymandering is bad news, assuming you believe that elections should mean something.

• Owen Gleiberman, Entertainment Weekly

  Arnold Schwarzenegger appears as the rare politician who supports reform in this timely exposé of how our democracy has slipped off its tracks.

• Willie Waffle, WaffleMovies.com

  Reichert has to come up with some way to draw us in, and does so, for the most part, with some very entertaining, shocking and dastardly tales of gerrymandering to the extreme

• Christopher Campbell, Cinematical

  The film's final statement is literally, "end gerrymandering,' which is hardly non-partisan itself.

• Annlee Ellingson, Moving Pictures Magazine

  Reichert for the most part succeeds with a subject that's hard to get excited about.

• Mark Keizer, Boxoffice Magazine

  Works fine as civics instruction but it won't move the needle against this decidedly anti-democratic process.

• Eric Monder, Film Journal International

  An important political subject gets sincere but slick treatment

• Chris Barsanti, Filmcritic.com

  unable to clearly and succinctly identify the problem it has wrapped its eighty-odd minutes of thinly-developed footage around

• Noel Murray, AV Club

  If we stipulate that gerrymandering is a pox on the American political process, do we have to sit through a documentary that makes that case in the most earnest, predictable way possible?

• Frederic and Mary Ann Brussat, Spirituality and Practice

  Offers a critical assessment of a corrupt political tool exploited by both Republicans and Democrats.

• Ed Gonzalez, Slant Magazine

  In trying to make the subject of gerrymandering interesting to the unwashed, Reichert has made it an ear- and eyesore for everyone else.

• Harvey S. Karten, Compuserve

  A pedestrian doc about one form of political corruption in the U.S.

Read all 16 critic reviews