SummaryRising from a farm boy to become President of the Soviet Union, Mikhail Gorbachev brought about changes that helped end the Cold War, toppled the USSR, enabled the reunification of Germany and transformed the world forever.
Directed By:Werner Herzog, André Singer
Written By:Werner Herzog
Meeting Gorbachev
Metascore
Generally Favorable
72
User score
Generally Favorable
6.9
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Top Cast
Metascore
Generally Favorable
82% Positive
18 Reviews
18 Reviews
18% Mixed
4 Reviews
4 Reviews
0% Negative
0 Reviews
0 Reviews
May 16, 2019
88
Defining a politician’s titan legacy in a singularly unexpected way, Meeting Gorbachev meets its expectations.
May 6, 2019
80
Historians of the period will learn nothing new from the movie, yet it remains a stirring enterprise, especially when it peers back, beyond the bright public record of Gorbachev’s heyday, into the mist of what feels like a distant past.
User score
Generally Favorable
60% Positive
6 Ratings
6 Ratings
40% Mixed
4 Ratings
4 Ratings
0% Negative
0 Ratings
0 Ratings
Oct 25, 2025
10
The question to ask is, "Why did Werner Herzog, who has made such terrific but decidedly offbeat documentaries, make a conventional biographical documentary with extensive conventional interviews in which the subject did the speaking?" The answer is clear: Herzog believed that it is of huge value today to see who Gorbachev was and hear what he had to say decades after he was in power. Herzog is correct. Two sad observations are that not more people have seen or absorbed it, and that the world lost what could turn out to be the final opportunity to avert our species' overriding focus on implacable competition and warfare at a time we face existential threats that could only be addressed through peaceful collaboration.
May 18, 2019
8
Despite a slight tendency to shortchange the first-person views of the principal subject (especially where his life outside of politics is concerned), director Werner Herzog's latest documentary presents a thorough look at the truly remarkable accomplishments of a pragmatic and visionary statesman, one whose work was abruptly stopped short by opportunists who kept him from seeing things all the way through. Some might term this a love letter to the former Soviet leader, but in many ways it also helps to set the record straight on his achievements and how he sadly became a tragic hero. Gorbachev's admonishments for the current geopolitical situation serve as an insightful warning against letting history repeat itself and undoing everything that he did that his predecessors were unable to accomplish. Genuinely moving and inspired viewing.
May 2, 2019
80
Meeting Gorbachev is a hagiography, but it’s unafraid to position itself as such; Herzog makes his case proudly and passionately.
May 17, 2019
75
Because the potential is extraordinary, it’s a surprise that the film, co-directed by Herzog and Andre Singer, is so conventional and enthusiastic, bordering on adoring.
Apr 29, 2019
75
Not since Klaus Kinski has Herzog aimed his camera at such an uncontrollable subject, and that includes the erupting peaks of “Into the Volcano” and the radioactive crocodiles in “The Cave of Forgotten Dreams.”
Nov 23, 2019
60
Despite the film’s obvious interest, it is a bit conceited and stately, a little like Wim Wenders’ movie about Pope Francis, though without the sycophancy.
Apr 30, 2019
50
The movie finally achieves some belated emotional power when it addresses, in its final minutes, Gorbachev’s beloved wife, Raisa, who died of leukemia in 1999. It does so, however, via clips from an entirely different documentary, Vitaly Mansky’s "Gorbachev: After Empire" (2001). Why not just watch that film, since Meeting Gorbachev never so much as mentions any event that’s happened since?
Nov 11, 2021
7
(Mauro Lanari)
With a real documentary, without fictitious inserts and after abandoning the cinema of "acting", Herzog finds in Gorbachev another figure worthy of his best cinema, and explains it himself in the film: a character from Greek tragedy, aware of having stubbornly desired a dream too big and beyond the limit, a man who on his grave would like to be written a humble "We tried", both on the human and political fronts. Yet there is an abysmal difference between the various "Aguirre" or "Fitzcarraldo" and "Gorbachev": this time it is not the defeat of a delirium of omnipotence, of a utopian idealist who crashes against Nature and its indomitable laws, but of a statesman who was demonstrating how the Leninist way to a "human" communism was viable, so much so that the conservative forces dismissed him with a putsch. The "repubblichino" Ezio Mauro plays dumb denying the historical and macroeconomic evidence: the fall of the Wall in '89 was only a consequence of the multiple reforms carried out during his secretariat from 1985 to 1991. Growing up in a kolkhoz, he had learned to increase the purchasing power not by raising incomes, salaries and wages (see Landini and today's false left), but by keeping prices down and therefore the cost of living. The variables to modify the gap between rich and poor are 2, and a left that is truly such acts on the second, not on the first one.
Production Company:
- Spring Films
- Werner Herzog Filmproduktion
Release Date:May 3, 2019
Duration:1 h 30 m
Tagline:An intimate portrait of a man who changed the course of history.
Awards
Biografilm Festival
• 2 Wins & 2 Nominations
Cleveland International Film Festival
• 1 Nomination
International Documentary Association
• 1 Nomination
