Bowling for Columbine (2002)
Dog Eat Dog Films

Description

The United States of America is notorious for its astronomical number of people killed by firearms for a developed nation without a civil war. With his signature sense of angry humor, activist filmmaker Michael Moore sets out to explore the roots of this bloodshed. In doing so, he learns that the conventional answers of easy availability of guns, violent national history, violent entertainment and even poverty are inadequate to explain this violence when other cultures share those same factors without the equivalent carnage. In order to arrive at a possible explanation, Michael Moore takes on a deeper examination of America's culture of fear, bigotry and violence in a nation with widespread gun ownership.

Tags

2000s, Academy Award winner, Gun control, NRA

Collected reviews and ratings

10 documentaryfilms.net | Bryan Newbury

Irrespective of its place in the Moore canon, and it is clearly at the top stylistically and on the basis of content, this is the most deserving Oscar winner since Annie Hall. It has all the characteristics of a film that will age like a Bordeaux.
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10 BBC | Nev Pierce

Funny, chilling and provocative, "Bowling for Columbine" is a documentary that works as a hugely entertaining movie, as well as a double-barreled blast at American gun culture and the media.
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9.7 DVD Verdict | Patrick Naugle

I can guarantee that you won't see a better, more provocative documentary this year. In a rare twist of fate, Bowling for Columbine really did deserve all the awards and praise that it garnered.
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9.0 Time | Richard Corliss

In most respects, the film is crisper than Moore's earlier work - it's a handsomely assembled essay in words and pictures - and less given to finger pointing than head scratching.
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8.8 TV Guide | Ken Fox

Riotously funny and deadly serious, Moore's two-hour documentary probes the received wisdom that prevalence of guns is solely responsible for the staggering number of gun-related deaths in the United States.
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8.3 Entertainment Weekly | Lisa Schwarzbaum

Michael Moore is one of the only large, unkempt, rambunctious shlubs around doing this provocative stuff on a popular, mass-movie level. We need his noisy, cocky energy, his passion and class consciousness; we need his shticks, we need his stones.
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8.0 filmcritic.com | Norm Schrager

Moore, with help from editor Kurt Engfehr, has become an exceptional composer of images and a master of timing. If you doubt his skills, witness his use of news clips containing horrifying gun murders, or security camera footage from the massacre at Columbine High School.
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7.0 Los Angeles Times | Kenneth Turan

Although is approach is scattershot, so to speak, Moore hits some targets. Anything that coaxes us into thinking about why we are the way we are, even as imperfectly as "Bowling for Columbine" does, is an energizing change of pace.
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7.0 New York Times | A.O. Scott

The slippery logic, tendentious grandstanding and outright demagoguery on display in ''Bowling for Columbine'' should be enough to give pause to its most ardent partisans, while its disquieting insights into the culture of violence in America should occasion sober reflection from those who would prefer to stop their ears.
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7.0 Amazon user reviews

Very good at times, but also aggravating and annoying.
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