Critic Reviews

Throughout Death of a Nation, which has the usual attacks on Clintons and George Soros and the third act “patriotic performances by D’Souza approved singers, even an African American choir, the man finds himself coddling Nazis.

D'Souza fans and Trump apologists will flock to this, misguided moths to a misleading flame. In that way, it's a perfect representation of the current climate. In every other way, it's a mess.

This is filmmaking as polemic, and much in the same way as Michael Moore’s (much better) films have a particular agenda to puzzle out various ways in which our country has failed us, this traffics in the same vein.

D’Souza fails, as ever, to make an argument that would resonate outside the QAnon echo chamber.

The meandering and insufferable Death of a Nation is little more than a greatest-hits collection of its creator’s favorite neocon conspiracy theories, which frame the Democratic Party for the fascistic tendencies embodied by Donald Trump.

In Death of a Nation, Dinesh D’Souza is no longer preaching to the choir; he’s preaching to the mentally unsound. That’s how detached from reality his “philosophy,” his armchair rage, and his passionate and consuming desire to be a radical-right shill have become.

For all of its incendiary arguments, Death of a Nation is ultimately tedious and repetitive. No one expects, of course, that D'Souza would make a thoughtful, balanced or historically accurate documentary. But is it unreasonable to hope that he make one that doesn't bore the pants off us?

The only thing preventing me from dubbing this one of the dumbest movies of any type that I have ever seen in my life is the fact that I am not entirely certain that something as shabbily constructed and artistically bankrupt as this actually qualifies as a movie in the first place.