96% Project Nim

All Critics (54) | Top Critics (17) | Fresh (52) | Rotten (2)

The film as a whole maintains a precarious but rewarding balance between multi-generational soap opera and simplistic animal-rights agitprop.

Marsh never speaks on or off camera, but his editing of the testimony makes clear his belief that in trying to make Nim more human, his teachers made themselves less so.

It's a gripping, unsentimental, at times unbearably sad real-life drama about an animal torn from his own world and stranded in the human one.

A documentary detailing man's inhumanity to beast, "Project Nim" ends up going past that to ask a deeper, disturbing question: Just who is the man, and who is the beast?

If only this were a media-fueled tall tale and not one poor creature's lifelong nightmare.

A darkly hilarious social portrait of the bizarre alternate universe of 1970s academia and an extraordinary biography of a non-human individual, on whom all sorts of human desires and ideologies were projected.

Affecting chimpanzee docu is more than monkey business.

Though Marsh's Errol Morris-like style can get glib, it never gets boring.

Director James Marsh smartly, slyly suggests through cinematic style that Project Nim was far from an authentic scientific experiment.

Extraordinarily evolved documentary, proving it's ethically and emotionally devastating to monkey with nature.

The 'nature vs. nurture' debate rarely explores each side so literally and so closely.

As he did in Man on Wire, Marsh seamlessly integrates dramatized shots and scenes with authentic home-movie and news footage of Nim and his human companions. I've never been a fan of recreations in documentaries, but Marsh uses them better than...

For a film where so many people seem, in varying degrees, culpable, Marsh indulges in very little finger-pointing. He doesn't need to. The indignities are hiding in plain sight.

A focused, very good documentary instead of the great one that could have been crafted from this bizarre true tale with a bit more scope.

Yet another captivating, heartfelt, provocative and stylishly edited documentary from the brilliant James Marsh.

Forget the chimp nature vs. nurture angle, someone should study the humans.

another singular case exploited and expanded to look ordinary

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Source: http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/project_nim/

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