Popular reviews

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  Review by Allison M. 🌱 ★★★★

  Tom Wolfe was a significant writer pretty much forgotten by the newest generations. I read one of his weaker novels (I Am Charlotte Simmons) which they cover a little bit in the documentary. I have also seen a couple of films adapted from his works: The Bonfire of the Vanities and The Right Stuff. The documentary provided guidance on maybe what books to check out next. It provided the proper historical context and did a great job of tackling a wildly creative author. 

  Vegan alert:
  -White silk tweed
  -Wool suit

  Q&A with Moderator Sonali Basak, Director Richard Dewey, Author Michael Lewis

  This is the 80th film I saw through the 2nd incarnation of MoviePass.

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  Review by Alan Zilberman ★½ 2

  It is obscene the filmmakers interviewed Peter Thiel for this.

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  Review by Ziah_Grace ½

  It’s so funny how they try to make this racist conservative Yale guy who, in the very first anecdote they start the movie with bails on his assignment after wasting 3 months drinking and chilling in an LA hotel on the magazine’s dime seem like a counter-culture rebel pushing back against the leftist dominating culture. Even funnier that the talking heads talking about how radical and cool he was are Peter Thiel and Hoover Institute guys.

  Man, it was so easy to be a beloved writer in the ‘60s. All you had to do was spend 3 months on a single 2000 word article about your time hanging out with famous people and doing drugs and you’d earn enough money to pay your NY brownstone rent for a year.

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  Review by Allan Arkush ★★★½

  I came upon Wolfe's writing in study hall at Fort lee High School in about 1965. With the 1st page of his Junior Johnson article I was hooked.

  Ten o’clock Sunday morning in the hills of North Carolina. Cars, miles of cars, in every direction, millions of cars, pastel cars, aqua green, aqua blue, aqua beige, aqua buff, aqua dawn, aqua dusk, aqua aqua, aqua Malacca, Malacca lacquer, Cloud lavender, Assassin pink, Rake-a-cheek raspberry, Nude Strand coral, Honest Thrill orange, and Baby Fawn Lust cream-colored cars are all going to the stock-car races, and that old mothering North Carolina sun keeps exploding off the windshields. Mother dog!

  Electric Acid Kool Aid pushed me to take control of my life and apply to Film School.

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  Review by Harvey

  Look, it's a doc that attempts to examine the long life and the dozen or so major works of a significant writer  in… 75 minutes.

  It is what you'd expect: Greatest hits structure — the early days, Tangerine, Acid Test, pissing off the Bernsteins, the Right Stuff, Bonfire, the decline, dead at 88 and, within all that, damn is Michael Lewis a fan.

  But, shit, if you're not gonna go six hours on something like this stuff, then at least make it quick. And also Gay Talese? Looking and sounding awfully damn spry at 91.

  Bottom lines: Newbies will learn a fair amount (in a fast peppy dose) and those already familiar with Wolfe won't really need it.

  Nevertheless: Virginia represent.

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  Review by Calvin Kemph 🤠 ★★★½

  Tom Wolfe is not just one of history’s most finely-tuned journo-novelists, he’s a weaponizer of invented language and punctuation. Wolfe’s a well-attired Southern Gentlemen — call him a Good Ol’ Boy, but know he created that phrase — who wrote cutting satire that dissected the way writing and culture worked all while creating new ways of writing and looking at culture. An editor’s worst enemy, Wolfe brandished the most disreputable punctuation markers: the exclamation mark; the ellipses; and an over-abundance of semi-colons. To read writing like that, you have to unlearn what you know about how writing works. You’ve just gotta read it in Tom Wolfe’s often-imitated cadence and abandon preconceptions about how that experience would usually go.

  What Tom…

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  Review by Vincent Prince 1

  Top five, bottom five (dependent on mood) adolescent memory: my father sitting down at the dinner table and effusively complimenting a paper I’d written on Thomas Wolfe and how I really “got” it, realizing about a year later he’d thought he’d read my analysis on Tom Wolfe. Haven’t been able to shake the disappointment since, and for some reason that incident of all things caused my largest loss of respect for him.  

  20 years ago this would’ve played unremarkably on public television and rerun every couple years. Watched in Delta Comfort+ with a coughing teen tilting toward me. Contains the bare minimum of information to be considered a “documentary.” Surely they tried to get Bradley Cooper to discuss Radical Chic.

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  Review by Dan O'Neill ★★★ 1

  Nothing I love more than a bunch of old-ass writers talking shit on each other. Need more of that honestly.

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  Review by boredgrizzly ★

  As subtle as an orgy full of academics all high on their own supply of ego and amphetamines, Radical Wolfe is an overly fawning, substance light look back on the career of journalist and novelist Tom Wolfe.

  Director Richard Dewey leans heavily on both Wolfe's own words (narrated by Jon Hamm) and an in-depth interview with avid admirer Michael Lewis (who provided the article this was based on, and was responsible for the source material for the likes of Moneyball, The Blind Side, and The Big Short). It's a straight up waltz through Wolfe's bibliography where a bunch of colleagues trip over themselves to praise the documentary's subject.

  That's a shame because Wolfe was an out and proud dick to…

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  Review by FilteredCoffee ★★

  I love Tom Wolfe, his writing is wildly energetic and always provocative but other than in the moments when his writing got to shine – and the Michael Lewis appearances – the documentary was a mixture of saccharine and downright offensive. There should be an embargo on Thiel’s face appearing in anything other than toilet paper, and if the filmmakers think that he and everything he stood for wouldn't have been a target of Wolfe’s blistering satire the they have deeply misunderstood the subject of their own documentary. A daring formalist and raconteur like Wolfe deserved a documentary as biting and innovative as his writing was.

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  Review by Tyler Malone ★½

  My Unwritten Essay Title:
  “A Wolfe in Sheep’s White Suit: Unlike the Writer, This Doc Has No Distinctive Style”

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  Review by megana 2

  slight but entertaining--it makes you long for something twice as long
  (why is Peter Thiel in this?)