The reviews lean strongly favourable, and most critics place it in the front rank of making-of documentaries, with several putting it at the head of the field. The praise clusters on Eleanor Coppola’s footage and the audio recordings she made on set, which critics say show a director stripped of his defences and full of self-doubt, and on the scale of the disasters catalogued: weather, government trouble, cast changes, illness, a reluctant star. A number of critics also read it as a lament for a period when American studios backed projects this ambitious and this unruly.
Reservations are few and the spread is narrow. The Los Angeles Times is admiring but more circumspect, finding the film neither celebratory nor iconoclastic and declining to call the whole enterprise either triumph or fiasco. The only mixed notice comes from The Skinny, which grants the mishaps their legend but finds ninety minutes of self-indulgence, a film mostly for cinephiles. Nobody dismisses it.