Newsday: (nuetral-positive review)
The most affecting figure in the film is Susan McDougal, ex-wife of onetime Clinton confidant James McDougal, whose manic- depression is blamed for the Whitewater scandal. Her refusal to tell Ken Starr what he wanted to hear led to two years in a maximum-security prison. There,
she was forced to wear the red dress marking a killer of one's own children; the abuses she recounts are horrifying.
One can argue against a lot of what the movie purports to prove, but the Susan McDougal case is like something out of a Robert Stone novel about a banana republic - the kind of thing, like much of "Hunting of the President," most Americans think couldn't happen here.
http://www.newsday.com/entertainment/movies/ny-huntingofpresident-movie,0,5575809.story?coll=ny-entertainment-bigpixFilm Critic nuetral-positive
It would have been nice if the documentary The Hunting of the President had been made in the late 1990s, when the country was in the throes of Monicagate, Whitewatergate, Troopergate and an endless flood of Clinton jokes, but in some sense it’s best to have this film released now, so we can look back from a time of actual crisis (war, faltering economy), chastised, and see just how much time we as a country wasted. Adapted from the book of the same title by Gene Lyons and Salon.com columnist Joe Conason, the film means to lay out the how and the why of what Hilary Clinton famously called “the vast right-wing conspiracy” to bring down her husband by any means necessary. About the only thing not proven here is that it was vast. There was a conspiracy (can you call it that if nobody’s bothering to keep it a secret?) to bring Clinton down, but it emanated from a fairly small cabal of Republican millionaires and ideologues who had the money and the venom necessary to do whatever it took to try and depose the sitting president.
Although rough around the edges and partisan to a fault, The Hunting of the President is nevertheless a passionate and worthy assault on an ugly period in our history; an anti-democratic scandal that happened right under our noses when we as a country were too busy worrying about Internet stock options to think that it really mattered.
http://filmcritic.com/misc/emporium.nsf/0/a95b3b65050ca62288256ebf008211f9?OpenDocumentFind a showing near you!
http://www.thehuntingofthepresident.com/presidentscreenings.html