70
Hogancamp is a complex character, and Marwencol introduces the man in layers, creating an incomplete yet sympathetic portrait specialty audiences and hipsters can agree on.
What are people saying?
What are critics saying?
75
Washington Post by Ann Hornaday
At its heart, it's about the communities we forge - real and imagined - to save our own lives.
60
When it comes to capturing the man behind the phenomenon, however, the film never progresses beyond a superficial, weird-yet-wonderful portraiture.
90
The New York Times by Jeannette Catsoulis
Four years in the making, Marwencol emerges as a number of things: an absorbing portrait of an outsider artist; a fascinating journey from near-death to active life; a meditation on the brain's ability to forge new pathways when old ones have been destroyed.
91
Entertainment Weekly by Lisa Schwarzbaum
This tender documentary considers the mysteries of both art and coping.
90
Village Voice by Michael Atkinson
Exactly the sort of mysterious and almost holy experience you hope to get from documentaries and rarely do, Jeff Malmberg's Marwencol is something like a homegrown slice of Herzog oddness, complete with true-crime backfill and juicy metafictive upshot.
75
Jeff Malmberg's documentary Marwencol is at its best when it focuses on Hogancamp's little world, and lets the artist walk the viewer through his town's increasingly dense mythology.
100
A strange and very beautiful documentary about the gray area between obsession and art.
75
First-time director Jeff Malmberg tells Hogancamp's fascinating story with sensitivity, never resorting to exploitation.
75
San Francisco Chronicle by Walter Addiego
If you have even a passing interest in outsider art, you owe it to yourself to see Marwencol.