97% Project Nim

All Critics (62) | Top Critics (20) | Fresh (60) | Rotten (2)

What makes this film especially engrossing is that what happened between that chimp and the humans with whom he spent his life in intimate contact turns out to be only half the story that Marsh, who directed the electrifying "Man on Wire," has to tell.

Marsh tells this story clearly and sympathetically, and he has the backlog of film and the witnesses to do so.

At times hilarious but ultimately heartbreaking, "Project Nim" is a great chronicle of the 1970s and all the nutty ideas that implies; academia in particular comes in for a hard reckoning.

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.

Very strong and takes more than a few pages out of the Errol Morris playbook.

Fascinating and exquisitely executed.

If movies about talking cars or warlike robots don't interest you, Project Nim is the latest documentary (following Buck) to offer a satisfying, adult alternative. It tells a story that is both stranger and more thought-provoking than...

A probing exploration--at times painfully so--of humankind's arrogance as well as of the moral superiority some other species unwittingly possess.

Fascinating characters...inescapably provokes consideration of the human animal's primal nature.

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.

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

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