Phonearl Good start, but then it gets ruined

Manthast Absolutely amazing

Stephan Hammond It is an exhilarating, distressing, funny and profound film, with one of the more memorable film scores in years,

Tyreece Hulme One of the best movies of the year! Incredible from the beginning to the end.

sang-77830 Spoiler Alert! Stupid documentary! Waste of time! No happy ending. A 23 year old Frenchman lied about being a 16 year old missing American. This show is a complete waste of time. There wasn't any Twist. We figured that the Frenchman was lying from the beginning, and it was revealed that we were right at the end.

Joe Day This is one of those flicks that I think I have seen before or rather tried to watch before but could not finish it. Well, it happened again. For the life of me I cannot fathom how these people fell for this fraud. I really don't. It is not like Six Degrees of Separation. It is not like the whole town did not know what Nicholas looked like. I don't care what kind of sex slave you were, your eyes do not change from blue to brown and you don't end up with a French accent having been abducted to Spain either.As for the real Nicholas, why does a 13-year-old have so many tattoes and how in less than 24 hours, did the impostor get them made to match with no scarring or anything by the time the sister arrived? And the sister said he had said kiss my ass to the family and run away for a day or two several times before - a little kid?I don't know. I just don't know. But I cannot finish the movie. IT hurts too much to see the family falling for this guy.

dunfincin I read a few reviews which admonished me not to discover too much about this "mysterious and compelling" story beforehand so I didn't.I really enjoy good documentary films so I watched it with an open mind and was ready to be compelled and mystified but I wasn't in the least.I found it all too obvious. A dark-haired French-speaking young man pretends to be a missing blond-haired English-speaking American boy and is apparently welcomed by his clearly dysfunctional family with open arms.So what's going to happen? He is discovered to be a fake(duh)and the family fall under suspicion and we eventually discover that one of them was a junkie and killed himself shortly after the boy went missing.Not much mystery or compulsion there. We are told of the mesmerising abilities and evil nature of the bogus heir apparent but he is no more than a failed chancer,more intelligent than he wants to appear but not as bright as he thinks he is.I've met plenty of those.The only surprise I found was how unbelievably thick and incompetent the relevant American officials were.It was like watching a thriller where you work out the entire plot in the first five minutes and then sit there bored stiff as it unfolds exactly thus. I'm sorry to review this film so negatively when many people obviously enjoyed it but if you are looking for mystery and intellectual challenges,you won't find them here in my opinion. A well-crafted but spuriously sensational film.

Coventry Good, respectfully made documentaries are very difficult to rate, and even more difficult to review! This is what I experience once again after watching Bart Leyton's uniquely jaw-dropping "The Imposter". It would have been so much easier if this were a fictional story… Then we would all be able to write that it's a bunch of implausible and far-fetched nonsense that sprung from the mind of an overly imaginative scriptwriter! But this is a true story and – believe me – incredibly hard to fathom! Leyton reconstructs, chronologically and patiently, the story of an unscrupulous French/Algerian fraud who incomprehensibly manages to impersonate a vanished 16-year-old Texan; misleading the boy's devastated family members as well as the authorities and the media. When apprehended in Spain, Frédéric Bourdin sees the opportunity to assume the identity of Nicholas Barclay, who disappeared without a trace in his hometown of San Antonio 3 years and 4 months ago. There's no way back when Nicholas' sister comes to bring him back to Texas, but even though he looks, sounds and acts completely different than Nicholas ever did, the family embraces Bourdin without questioning his grotesque made up testimonies. Only gradually, some people become skeptical and begin to dig a deeper in Bourdin's persona, like a social worker and a private detective. The most praiseworthy aspect about "The Imposter", and I believe this is entirely Bart Leyton's very own accomplishment, is that this documentary isn't manipulative or judgmental at all. The film doesn't condemn the family members for their blindness, naivety or how easily they were brainwashed. Quite important, because this made me – personally - feel less like a voyeur in observing all the pain these people had to endure. Bourdin himself is also even granted to elaborate on his miserable childhood and his urge to compensate through becoming a phony. Leyton's narrative style is captivating and honest, and you hardly even notice the whole thing gradually turning from documentary into a tense thriller/film-noir. "The Imposter" is something you just have to discover yourself, I can only repeat that it's an incredible story that you don't even fully when you are gazing at it.