80
Watching The Ghost of Peter Sellers is like watching a 15-vehicle car crash in slow motion.
What are people saying?
What are critics saying?
100
San Francisco Chronicle by G. Allen Johnson
It is quite simply one of the great “making of” documentaries of all-time — a short list that includes the George Hickenlooper-Eleanor Coppola documentary “Hearts of Darkness.”
88
The result is the most fascinating documentary about a failed movie since 1965’s “The Epic That Never Was,” about the abortive Korda-produced, von Sternberg-directed, and Charles Laughton-starring film of Robert Graves’ great novel I, Claudius.
50
Everyone in the documentary agrees that the undertaking was truly terrible and misconceived. The extensive footage here does nothing to contradict such a view.
70
Rolling Stone by Peter Travers
Movie junkies, rejoice. Director Peter Medak has made an instructive and nightmarishly funny documentary about how actor Peter Sellers drove him crazy and nearly trashed his career.
78
Austin Chronicle by Richard Whittaker
What's most fascinating is that there's no self-indulgence on Medak's behalf. It's a filmmaker coming to terms with a deep bruise in his life, and the realization that time may heal all wounds, but will still leave a scar.
83
Emotionally and psychologically, The Ghost Of Peter Sellers, is an A-grade film. Aesthetically, however, it’s a little flat, and kind of takes too long to truly reveal itself even at a scant 93 minutes. Still, it’s ultimately an emotionally cathartic and absorbing movie about a man who can’t let go, yet wants to be free.
75
All this piling on turns Ghost of Peter Sellers into a “pathography,” the nickname given biographies that torch the reputations of the dead. And frankly, it’s deserved.
70
The Hollywood Reporter by Todd McCarthy
This can't-take-your-eyes-off-it documentary feels like both a mea culpa and a purge of lingering ghosts.
70
The Ghost of Peter Sellers is a movie that seems to have been made by Medak, for Medak. It’s a mildly interesting footnote in cinema history, and worth watching for Sellers fans, Medak fans and aficionados of obscure cinema (you know who you are).