Critic Reviews

If you’re not at all familiar with the originals, but you know and/or love Back to the Future, that should be enough to guarantee you a good time at this almost-lawsuit-worthy homage/parody to the 1980s time travel classic. And if perchance you already love both Nirvanna and BTTF, then strap in, because when this movie hits 88 kilometres an hour…

An achievement as unlikely as it is inspired.

It’s movies like these that prove that cinema still has the capacity to surprise, even in criminally goofy comedies like this.

An instant cult-classic comedy that should be seen with a rowdy crowd — and then cherished for years to come on repeated quote-along home viewings.

Johnson films the action in the same freewheeling documentary style as the television series, mixing hidden-camera encounters with unsuspecting members of the public and increasingly ambitious set pieces. The result preserves the scrappy, improvised amiability of the original while expanding it into a diabolically clever comedy, poignantly pivoting around two chums as they confront the distance between youthful certainty and middle age.

More than anything, NTBTSTM is simply hilarious – a furiously funny roller coaster of a film whose energy never, ever dips. It is difficult to imagine a better, sharper comedy coming along this year. Or the next.

It functions just as much as a standalone movie as it does a conclusion for a beloved project. If Johnson and McCarroll never reach these comedic heights again, just be glad they managed to get the Canadian government to fund and release this.

Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie is not only the funniest movie I’ve seen at SXSW, it’s one of the funniest I’ve seen in years.

Part guerrilla prank saga, part heartwarming friendship story, and part riff on Back to the Future, the result is an incredibly fine-tuned mishmash of styles and ideas that keeps evolving in surprising ways.

It’s not what you think. It’s as if Monty Python had an excellent adventure with Bill & Ted & Borat. You will laugh helplessly.