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Won't You Be My Neighbor?

Fred Rogers used puppets and play to explore complex social issues like race, disability, and equality, helping form the American concept of childhood on his famous TV show. He spoke directly to the children, inspiring generations to live with compassion and limitless imagination. But, have we lived up to Fred's ideal of good neighbors?
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WHAT ARE CRITICS SAYING?

70

Variety by Amy Nicholson

Neville’s fantastic archival footage reveals the man through his work — or at least, it reveals his philosophies, if not the childhood memories that gave Rogers the ability to understand a four-year-old’s brain, almost as if he still carried his in his cardigan pocket.
80

The Hollywood Reporter by Dan Fienberg

There's more to Fred Rogers than any 93-minute documentary can contain, and it was easy for me not to lament what Neville wasn't doing and just to embrace what Rogers was.
50

The Film Stage by Daniel Schindel

The film can easily coast on sentimentality and nostalgia for emotion, and does so frequently and unabashed. Which is frustrating, since there are glimpses of a more complex human being throughout the film, one who would have made for a much better subject.
91

IndieWire by Eric Kohn

In Won’t You Be My Neighbor, the touching and insightful survey of Rogers’ decades-spanning career from Oscar-winning director Morgan Neville (“Twenty Feet From Stardom”), the filmmaker highlights Rogers’ capacity to explore complex themes through the lens of a kid’s program that took a dead-serious approach to his young viewers’ needs.
80

Village Voice by Lara Zarum

Watching this movie is like freebasing sincerity — a scarce resource in our current entertainment hellscape. It’ll give you warm fuzzies for days.
90

Uproxx by Mike Ryan

It’s kind of hard to write about Won’t You Be My Neighbor? as a film. It’s exceptionally well-made, mind you – which shouldn’t be a huge surprise coming from Morgan Neville, who won an Academy Award for directing 20 Feet From Stardom – but beyond being a film, it’s an experience of earnestness we don’t see or hear much anymore, to the point that it’s a bit of a jolt to the system.
88

Boston Globe by Peter Keough

In his three-decade run, Rogers touched millions of souls. But the film is honest in questioning whether, in the end, he really made a difference.
88

Movie Nation by Roger Moore

Oscar winner Morgan Neville (“20 Feet From Stardom”) carves in stone the case for Rogers’ as an authentic American TV saint.

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