Movie · 1995 · Drama, History · 3h 12m · R · English
Curator score: 5.6/10 (54.6K ratings)
Triumphant in Victory, Bitter in Defeat. He Changed the World, But Lost a Nation.
Overview
A look at President Richard M. Nixon—a man carrying the fate of the world on his shoulders while battling the self-destructive demands from within—spanning his troubled boyhood in California to the shocking Watergate scandal that would end his Presidency.
Ratings
Curator score: 5.6/10
IMDb: 7.0/10
Letterboxd: 3.62/5
Rotten Tomatoes: 76%
Metacritic: 66
TMDB: 6.9/10
Director
Oliver Stone
Production
Cinergi Pictures, Hollywood Pictures, Illusion Entertainment Group
Cast
Anthony Hopkins, Joan Allen, Powers Boothe, Ed Harris, Bob Hoskins, E.G. Marshall, David Paymer, David Hyde Pierce, Paul Sorvino, Mary Steenburgen, J.T. Walsh, James Woods, Brian Bedford, Kevin Dunn, Fyvush Finkel, Annabeth Gish, Tom Bower, Tony Goldwyn, Larry Hagman, Edward Herrmann
Curator Review
Verdict
A sprawling, serious political biopic that treats Nixon less as a cartoon villain than as a damaged, self-mythologizing operator trapped inside American power. It’s long and sometimes heavy-handed, but the ambition, performances, and historical sweep make it one of Oliver Stone’s most substantial films.
Best for
viewers who like epic political dramas
fans of morally complicated historical portraits
people interested in Watergate-era American history
audiences who appreciate heightened, operatic filmmaking
Skip if
you want a brisk, tightly plotted biopic
you dislike Oliver Stone’s maximalist style
you prefer strictly neutral or restrained historical drama
you’re looking for a feel-good political story
Overview
Nixon is Oliver Stone at his most grandiose and most serious, turning a presidential biography into a national tragedy. Rather than reducing Richard Nixon to a punchline, the film frames him as a wounded, paranoid, deeply ambitious figure whose private insecurities and public appetites feed each other until they become history. Anthony Hopkins leans into the role with force, and Joan Allen gives the film much of its emotional gravity.
Worth noting
What makes the movie stand out is its sense that Watergate is only the visible symptom of something larger: Cold War power, institutional rot, and the American habit of turning politics into myth. Stone’s style can be overcranked and occasionally exhausting, but that excess is part of the point. The film wants Nixon’s mind, Nixon’s era, and Nixon’s legacy to feel unstable and overfull.
Bottom line
It’s not the cleanest or most accessible political epic, and its runtime will test patience. But for viewers open to a big, messy, emotionally charged historical film, it remains one of the more ambitious attempts to understand a president as both man and symbol.
Top Letterboxd reviews
Hesse (5★) · 904 likes
Nixon, stop! You smoke too tough! Your swag too different! Your bitch too bad! They’ll kill you Nixon!
Will Menaker (4★) · 681 likes
Stone brings his heavy-handed sense of Shakespearean tragedy to bear on Nixon in this surprisingly sympathetic portrait of the 37th President of the United States. While this is not as deliriously entertaining as JFK, it is massively underrated and makes far less of a travesty of the historical record than his take on the Kennedy assassination. And what was the Watergate coverup really all about at the end here? The Bay of Pigs and the subsequent blowback that blew off… more Stone brings his heavy-handed sense of Shakespearean tragedy to bear on Nixon in this surprisingly sympathetic portrait of the 37th President of the United States. While this is not as deliriously entertaining as JFK, it is massively underrated and makes far less of a travesty of the historical record than his take on the Kennedy assassination. And what was the Watergate coverup really all about at the end here? The Bay of Pigs and the subsequent blowback that blew off… more
matt lynch (4.5★) · 533 likes
"It's not an operation as much as an organic phenomenon. It grew. It changed shape. It developed appetites."
Stone's CITIZEN KANE and his original secret history of the United States, not just the story of a man consumed by his failures and flaws but of a manifest destiny that mutated out of all control. Staggering.
Josh Lewis (4★) · 358 likes
Stone takes some of that hypnotizing, over-cranked formal hysteria he developed on JFK and his obsession with American history as a grandiose, rambling myth of diseased power and manic paranoia, and tries to shape it around the form of an empathetic portraiture where Nixon despite the obvious warts is something of a Charles Foster Kane figure; an unloved tyrant who may also have been a tragic, haunted overseer of an untamable, bloodthirsty empire on autopilot. I think I slightly prefer… more Stone takes some of that hypnotizing, over-cranked formal hysteria he developed on JFK and his obsession with American history as a grandiose, rambling myth of diseased power and manic paranoia, and tries to shape it around the form of an empathetic portraiture where Nixon despite the obvious warts is something of a Charles Foster Kane figure; an unloved tyrant who may also have been a tragic, haunted overseer of an untamable, bloodthirsty empire on autopilot. I think I slightly prefer… more
comrade_yui (5★) · 237 likes
the ingenious way stone weaves together so many strands of american ideology -- nixon's dogged masochistic quakerism, the CIA black-budget security state's need for a 'useful idiot' as a political smokescreen/scapegoat, the neoliberal technate dissolving the cold war by "linking the whole world through self-interest" -- like JFK, this is a film about the image of the presidency as much as the actual presidency.
nixon keeps referring to himself in the third person, as if he's not himself -- if… more