Metacritic reviews

There's more killer suspense and shocking intimacy in this one-of-a-kind documentary than you'll find in a dozen thrillers. You'll laugh hard and cry too.

Catfish is absolutely riveting, and even nerve-wracking as Joost and the Schulmans get progressively closer to learning more about their "friends."

Although Catfish is opportunistic, even borderline exploitive, it gets at-by indirection, through the back door-the magic-carpet aspect of this scary new medium. Real people are so complicated and irreducible, you know?

Jaw-dropping and surprisingly kind-hearted considering the circumstances.

Though editor Zac Stuart-Pontier assembles the sprawling personal journey into swift and suspenseful shape, it helps immensely that Nev is such a charming screen presence.

Catfish was built to charm, not indict, and on that front it makes for a diverting seriocomic wade into the pitfalls of Internet-based immediacy, and by extension, the manipulative mysteries of documentary assemblage.

This is a film of warmth, humor, suspense and surprising grace.

Whether you think Catfish is fact or fiction, it certainly taps into something true: the basic, common need to believe that what feels like love is real.

In Catfish, the camera's-rolling readiness to trawl for drama leaves a slimy aftertaste.

I'll respect the studio's wishes to abbreviate all plot description. God knows, they're marketing it like the second coming of "The Crying Game," though the revelations that await Nev are only shocking if you believe P.T. Barnum was really in possession of a genuine Fiji mermaid.