Metacritic reviews

Experimenter offers a heady brew of theories about the essence of human nature, and a Peter Sarsgaard performance that catches Milgram in all his seductive, megalomaniacal brilliance.

Experimenter is busily, thrillingly reflective. Its artificiality makes it seem even more alive, more in the present tense.

The movie is itself a rat-maze of one-sided mirrors, windows upon windows, anonymous hallways, compartmentalized instances of watching, being watched, seeing and not-seeing.

Ultimately, Experimenter finds a glimmer of hope by simply revealing itself. Maybe if more people are educated about the dangers of obedience, they’ll put up more resistance. It can’t hurt to hope.

Technically puckish where appropriate but grounded by strong performances from Peter Sarsgaard and Winona Ryder, the film is not awards bait but makes some Big Thinker biographies that are look staid.

Almereyda has created an experiment of his own: a kind of cinematic Rorschach test, prodding viewers to consider what they would do if sitting in the same seat as Milgram’s subjects.

Aesthetically, the film cunningly suggests life that exists solely within an academic experiment, closed off from chaos that isn't manufactured.

Ethical objections to Milgram’s work are presented as killing the messenger; well-known issues with his methodology appear not at all. The movie’s an intellectual shock tactic, but it succeeds.

Experimenter is a capital example of that prophet-ahead-of-his-time narrative, a movie about a scientist who lived (just) long enough to revel in the fact that he was onto something before everybody else. And that he was right.

While the experiment itself is fascinating, the approach taken by Almereyda in using distractingly peculiar storytelling techniques only succeed in distancing the audience from the film's inspiration.