Metacritic reviews

Some 40 years in the making, the remarkable Kurt Vonnegut: Unstuck in Time is a gorgeously rendered, unexpectedly moving appraisal of the life and craft of one of the best-loved literary voices of the late 20th century.

Filmmaker Bob Weide’s relationship with Kurt Vonnegut may detract from a more incisive critical portrait but it is sweetly etched, and the unparalleled access provides a comical, compelling profile of a singular figure in 20th-century American letters.

Selected readings from novels and short stories are imaginatively visualised, and the final sequences are profoundly moving. Vonnegut would have been proud of the finished film, although he did not live to see it.

A very touching and insightful film.

There is, nevertheless, something to be said for a documentary that tries to do something different and perhaps impossible, even if it doesn't quite get there. And in the end, any flaws or missed opportunities are subsumed by the movie's sincerity and wealth of insight.

While approachable even to casual readers, thanks to patient explanations by scholars and biographers who’ve made Vonnegut their life’s work, the film isn’t really geared toward converting skeptics, revealing new information or even telling a really great yarn. It’s an opportunity to bask in Vonnegut’s wit and intelligence — to admire the crackerjack delivery of his jokes, savor the offbeat perfection of his prose, drink in the playfulness of his smile.

That's where Kurt Vonnegut: Unstuck in Time is most fascinating, in its exploration of the blurred lines between what who writers (and filmmakers) are, and what they write, and why they write.

The film pulls back the veil on Kurt Vonnegut to show how a gloomy dissatisfaction brooded underneath his quippy surface personality.

If “Unstuck in Time” offers an erudite and affectionate portrait of its subject despite being so oddly generic, Weide shares his own frustrations with it in such a plainspoken way that he can’t help but pass them along to us.

Vonnegut’s family members and biographers provide the most intriguing material in Kurt Vonnegut: Unstuck in Time, but their interviews are too brief to enhance viewers’ appreciation of his work.