Critic Reviews

The movie culminates in a cinematic coup de grâce bold enough to spin your head — one that gives the movie an entirely new dimension.

Nuts! manages to create a fascinating, thrilling portrait of the weirdness of industrial-age America that’s as side-splitting as it is deeply haunting.

Brilliantly combining archival material, voiceovers, contemporary interviews and a variety of hand-drawn animation, the movie deconstructs the process of self-mythologizing from the inside out.

This marvelous, mostly animated doc/drama hybrid couldn't have come along at a better time.

The real skill in Lane’s colorful tale about self-made millionaire, “inventor” and maverick John R. Brinkley is that it revels in how fun it is to believe in the unbelievable, and how sinisterly effective the mixture of fact and fiction can be. That includes, Lane eventually reveals, documentaries themselves.

Once the movie is over and you realize how the filmmaker has turned the tables, you can't help but be amused — and amazed.

Throughout, director Penny Lane strings together telling incidents and anecdotes with a light touch.

You may or may not connect Brinkley to a certain presidential candidate, but, either way, this is one of the most entertaining documentaries to come along in some time.

Nuts! is a brisk, engrossing, tongue-in-cheek film that unfolds at just the right pace — and it’s a piece of American history that couldn’t feel more relevant to modern times.

One of Penny Lane’s best pictures, Nuts! is quite a brilliant way to tell a peculiar story. Condensing a lot of material into a brief running time, this format allows certain liberties to be taken, particularly when imagined conversations appear.