Religulous (2008)
Thousand Words

Description

'Religulous' is a 2008 American documentary film directed by Larry Charles and starring political comedian Bill Maher. According to Maher, the title of the film is a portmanteau derived from the words "religion" and "ridiculous," implying the satirical nature of the documentary that is meant to mock the concept of religion and the problems it brings about.

Collected reviews and ratings

9.0 documentaryfilms.net | Bryan Newbury

From alpha to omega, Religulous delivers on every promise the viewer perceives. It is an oasis of doubt in a troubling desert of certainty. It is a Swiftian barb, though not petty or mean, at the folks who cause the thinking man all manner of inconvenience, from prohibition of Sunday beer sales to turkey bacon to circumcisions both male and female.
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7.5 Rolling Stone | Larry Charles

Maher can be a smartass, but his attempts to apply reason to religion are more a challenge than a threat.
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7.0 Variety | Robert Koehler

Maher’s transformation into one of America’s sharpest social critics is remarkable. He takes no script credit, but his periodic monologues to the camera are undeniably written, and written well.
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6.0 DVD Talk | Brian Orndorf

Maher's points are significant, defiant, and insightful, but his delivery is too condescending to make a profound impression. Ideally, "Religulous" is the type of film to be sent off into the world to crack open a few eyes and change some lives. In reality, only those patient with Maher and already free of devotion will be receptive to the message. It's a missed opportunity.
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5.8 Entertainment Weekly | Owen Gleiberman

Religulous emerges as the first movie jape of the Sarah Palin era. It's a film that's destined to make a lot of people mad, but Maher, for all his showy atheistic ''doubt,'' isn't just trying to crucify religion — he truly wants to know what makes it tick.
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5.0 Wall Street Journal | Joe Morgenstern

Bill Maher is the Borat of the God beat in "Religulous," a provocation, thinly disguised as a documentary, that succeeds in being almost as funny as it is offensive.
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5.0 ReelViews | James Berardinelli

The problem with the movie, whose title compresses "religious" and "ridiculous" into a single word, isn't that it milks more than one sacred cow but that it does so with minimal subtlety and intelligence.
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5.0 New York Times | Stephen Holden

Although theologians and scientists are interviewed in the film, they are fleeting presences in a documentary that doesn’t pretend to be a serious cultural or scientific exploration of the roots of faith.
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3.0 Salon.com | Andrew O'Hehir

His scattershot and ad hominem attacks against many different forms of religious hypocrisy don't add up to a coherent critique, and he's not qualified to provide one. Any serious theologian from the mainstream Christian or Jewish traditions would have eaten his lunch for him, and that's why we don't see anybody like that in this film for more than a second or two.
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