Critic Reviews

Anyone who says voting is a waste of time needs to watch this film.

If the paranoia level could probably withstand a slight reduction, much of the movie feels utterly credible.

While it lacks the emotional intensity of the duo’s Oscar-nominated The Square—a rousing 2013 look at Egypt’s Arab Spring—The Great Hack still feels of a piece, inviting viewers to contemplate the power and irreversibility of their online footprint.

The Great Hack couldn’t be more timely, or unsettling. An intentionally disturbing examination of the Cambridge Analytica scandal, it both explains and offers a warning shot about the misuse of personal data and how that influenced past elections and might well do so in the future.

The Great Hack will be catnip for data wonks and mathematicians, but I sense its desired purpose is to be a cautionary tale for the general viewer. I think it’s a tad too long and a bit too wishy-washy when it should be angrier, but I was fascinated by it for a very specific personal reason.

At its best, The Great Hack will alarm you, infuriate you, and — hopefully — activate you.

Have we learned anything? Have the “Bond villains” at the heart of this story been discouraged from repeating their actions? Do we have any idea what can be done, and is anything at all BEING done?

The Great Hack uses a decent rehash of the Cambridge Analytica scandal as the starting point for an interesting two-pronged character study, an instigation for provocative ideas about data crime and what is ultimately a really, really, really conflicted look at when it's terrifying having corporations learning things about our online habits and when it's cool.

You know you’re in the hands of professionals here — Noujaim was a director or co-director on such solid nonfiction works as "Startup.com" (2001), "Control Room" (2004), and "The Square" (2013) — even if the proceedings sometimes come off like Muckraking Moviemaking 101.

As eye-opening and propulsive as the movie is, Amer and Noujaim don’t always keep the thread of their multi-faceted narrative, which was going to be a daunting task for any well-meaning filmmaker trying to give you arresting personalities while parsing complex aspects of the digital world.