Metacritic reviews

With its strong character work that gets interwoven with a striking story of sabotage, How to Blow Up a Pipeline is a riveting tapestry of the plight facing the modern climate justice movement.

What makes How to Blow Up a Pipeline great, is that it so deftly wins us to its cause anyway. It’s absolutely electric filmmaking.

In a less interesting film, this would all be seen through the eyes of freshly radicalized documentarian Shawn (Scribner, black-ish), but Goldhaber amplifies the tension by keeping this an ensemble.

In favouring the dramatic over the didactic, Goldhaber arguably buries the themes of the source text a little too deeply, resulting in a film that isn’t quite the call to action it might have been. Still, its message resonates – and its bomb-setting scenes are as nail-biting as cinema’s best bomb disposals.

Few films feel as excitingly jacked in to our current social climate as Daniel Goldhaber’s How to Blow Up a Pipeline.

An efficient thriller with eco-political ambitions.

Making it all work is the cast, all experienced but mostly just-unknown enough to give How to Blow Up a Pipeline a genuine indie anarchist feel.

These people seem real, even if their primary motivations are ideological. Perhaps more than they intended to, Goldhaber and the actors make the political personal. That’s a triumph of craft over appetites for destruction.

How To Blow Up A Pipeline plays like a taut thriller that tells an unusual story. Its strength lies in making a topical issue palatable and highly watchable.

How to Blow Up a Pipeline is at its best when it functions as a kind of roughed-up caper movie; it has a degree of suspense and efficiency that are becoming all too rare in the mainstream.