Metacritic reviews

Like their earlier Trouble the Water, Carl Deal and Tia Lessin portray men and women yearning for a simple place in society as they become casualties to the self-involvement of larger forces.

What ultimately helps Citizen Koch rise above the dozens of other movies like it is a focus not just on recent developments in American politics, but also on the bedrock of what has made this country such an enduringly great, astoundingly troubled experiment: one person, one vote.

For real balance, the debate needs fiercely leftist truth-tellers in tri-corner hats, calling themselves the Organic Chai Tea Party.

Citizen Koch is kind of a mess. But it’s a mess well worth discovering for yourself.

Some material in the docu feels repetitive or unnecessary. But the main problem is that “Citizen Koch” simply juggles too many themes and narratives to cohere. The result is largely compelling in the moment, but unsatisfying as a whole.

For those who didn't know how flawed and manipulated the act of casting a ballot has become, Citizen Koch is a decent enough primer, but for everyone else long past the tipping point, this is just more evidence for a problem that currently has no solution.

While one might agree or disagree with their theme, aesthetically Citizen Koch is feisty.

Citizen Koch is undisciplined and depressing, yet still strangely worthwhile.

It’s a hodgepodge that Michael Moore (whose movies Ms. Lessin and Mr. Deal have produced) and his editors might snappily dice together, but here the construction falls short.

Carl Deal and Tia Lessin's scattershot agitprop doc takes the perfidy of the billionaire Koch brothers as its given, offering up montages of Tea Party screamers rather than investigative reporting or rigorous argumentation.