Quartile rating: 6.5/10 · 1 rating
Bruce Conner’s most celebrated film for a reason: it takes historical moments that were replayed over and over on television—chilling repetition of Kennedy assassination coverage—and repurposes them into a meditation on how the media tries to exert authority and apply a sense of order to the anarchic. And though it may sound perverse to say so, the film is also—not incidentally—a thrill to watch. -- The A.V. Club
Bruce Conner's 'Report' is a singular piece of found-footage avant-garde filmmaking that deconstructs the Kennedy assassination media coverage with remarkable formal intelligence. Its Novelty and Cinematography/editing earn top marks — the way Conner loops, fragments, and interrogates television footage as a meditation on media authority is genuinely one-of-a-kind and highly influential on experimental film. Acting is essentially irrelevant in this found-footage context, so it scores low by default rather than failure. The Plot, while conceptually strong, is more of a structural meditation than a conventional narrative arc, earning a solid but not exceptional mark. The Ending is effective but not transcendent.