Won't You Be My Neighbor?

Remarkable film.

If there’s anyone deserving of hagiography, it’s Rogers. This documentary truly captures the depth of his goodness and earnestness, peeling back layers to reveal an even better person than you remembered. “Won’t You Be My Neighbor?” doesn’t cast Rogers as perfect, but it’s hard to imagine a more admirable man.

Neville’s film isn’t making a case for canonization. But it is a call to action.

Without undue fawning, Neville’s moving portrait does a lovely job of presenting Rogers as two people, the public figure and the private one, sharing the same closet full of zip-up sweaters.

Neville's goal here is not so much to tell the story of Rogers' personal life, though that does get some play, but rather to detail the how and why of his success, to show the way someone whose formidable task was, in his own words, "to make goodness attractive" was able to make it happen.

The film functions as a time machine to take the viewer back to when (s)he watched “Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood” on television and re-introduces the man who functioned as a friend/mentor/father-figure.

The film can easily coast on sentimentality and nostalgia for emotion, and does so frequently and unabashed. Which is frustrating, since there are glimpses of a more complex human being throughout the film, one who would have made for a much better subject.

This is a wonderfully made documentary film about the life and career of Fred Rogers, more famously known as Mr. Rogers, host of the classic PBS children’s television program, Mr. Rogers’ Neighbourhood. It is perfect as far as documentaries go. It’s about an interesting subject, it has lots of archival footage and photos as well as new footage and interviews from people who knew Fred Rogers, and it goes over his entire life and addresses pretty much everything associated with the legendary television host. This movie both warms and breaks your heart. It’s feel-good and feel-bad. I recommend this to absolutely anyone. It’s an important film to watch in this day and age. It reminds us all that there is so much good in the world, no matter how bad things get.

An Amazing Documentary of the life of an amazingly wonderful man who wanted to do and show good to the world and teach children the right and wrongs of the world. you do not need to have known Fred Rodgers or his tv show this documentary will leave you crying and wanting to see someone do what Fred Rogers did in the world we live in today.

A wonderful walk down memory lane and so much more. Loved this film and can't recommend it enough.

Amazing. Just Amazing. Best movie of 2018. It is also the most powerful movie of this century. Morgan Neville is just amazing. AMAZING

I grew up before Sesame Street and Mister Rogers, and so I lack the nostalgic ties to Fred Rogers that other moviegoers may possess. Ponderous and hagiographical, the movie details the career of what can most accurately be described as a very unusual man who just happened to find a noncompetitive niche for his talents in the nascent public TV medium. The biographical elements that might have made the movie much more interesting to people who were acquainted with Fred Rogers primarily through Eddie Murphy and Johnny Carson's parodies of him--where did he grow up, what were his parents like, what were his experiences growing up in school, how did he meet and court his wife, what did his kids have to endure as a result of having such an unusual father, what drew him to focus his work on preschoolers--are conspicuously absent from this biographical documentary. Moviegoers leave the theater having viewed a worshipful account of the adult professional life of an apparently virtuous but--frankly--downright weird character whose most salient characteristic was being so consistently strange that other people found him disarming.