Metacritic 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 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.

No matter what form it takes, The Great Hack exists as a giant contradiction sure to evoke strong responses from anyone impacted by its drama, which is basically everyone.

It’s a sign of how quickly it feels like the world is being torn apart around us that even a ripped-from-the-headlines documentary, such as Karim Amer and Jehane Noujaim’s The Great Hack, can feel almost dated.

There’s no satisfying end point to this movie (which premiered at Sundance as a 135-minute work in progress; over 20 minutes have since been trimmed), which reaches its alarmist conclusion quite early on and then functions more as a frustratingly sporadic video diary.

The film spends more time dramatizing the scandal’s worst-case scenario than examining the facts — producing compelling personal narratives at the cost of valuable context and perspective.

It seems so invested in a rehabilitation of Brittany Kaiser’s image that the filmmakers’ own motives end up being its most interesting subject.