Our old colleague Kristine Parks at FoxNews.com notes the new movie Reagan, starring Dennis Quaid, is strongly liked by audiences with a 97 percent audience score on the site Rotten Tomatoes. But the critics are liberals, and among them, it only had a 26 percent score.
Compare that to the 2016 movie Southside with You, a biopic which gushed over young Barack and Michelle Obama. Both were positive movies, but the Obama film received rave reviews and a 91 percent score by critics (71 percent audience).
Christian Toto told Fox News: "Film critics, by and large, lean relentlessly to the left, and they let that flavor their reviews. So, when a Michael Moore film hits theaters, the response will be glowing, by and large, regardless of the content. The recent projects tied to progressive heroes like President Barack Obama (Southside with You) and Ruth Bader Ginsberg (RBG) are similarly hailed even by those who use the term ‘hagiography.’"
Nick Shrager of The Daily Beast used the H-word for Reagan: "You may have suspected that this MAGA-tinged hagiography would be absolute trash, but it turns out you didn’t think low enough," he wrote. It’s “the worst movie of the year.”
"Regardless of how you feel about Ronald Reagan the president, most will be united in finding this biopic a preachy, plodding, graceless groaner," he added. “McNamara’s film is so ungainly and transparent that it plays like embarrassing propaganda."
Washington Post critic Ty Burr declared “Quaid offers a congenial impersonation with little depth, in part because depth is not what we wanted (or got) from Reagan.”
Communism? Who finds evil in communism? Burr doesn’t: “Reagan organizes its narrative around its subject’s lifelong fight against the Red Menace, which it assumes we know is bad without being told why. Godlessness, mostly…”
Burr concluded: "The faithful for whom Reagan was made aren’t likely to see that it’s a hagiography as rosy and shallow as anything in a Kremlin May Day parade. As pop-culture propaganda — popaganda, if you will — the movie’s strictly for true believers. As history, it’s worthless.”
It's especially stupid to (a) suggest there's nothing provably evil about communism and then (b) compare the anti-communists to a Kremlin May Day parade. He's just trolling.
The movie review in the Hollywood trade magazine Variety was less brutal that these, but still characterized it as a "blatantly worshipful biopic." Hollywood Reporter critic Stephen Farber similarly summarized the film as an "overly reverential tribute to a controversial politician."
