Popular reviews

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  Review by Ayo Edebiri ★★★★½

  this was so damn fun lol

  William Daniels’ scene as the gun-obsessed, black neighbor name-dropping liberal.....I’m complimenting the chef, I’m kissing ‘em, etc.!!!

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  Review by Will Menaker ★★★½ 1

  If your analyst is dressed like this, you going to jail fasho!

  
  James Coburn is...The President's Analyst. After landing the choicest gig in all of therapy, Coburn finds it's not all it's cracked up to be, his teenage gf is a spy and everyone wants him dead. He goes on the run, becomes a hippie, and teams up with a Russian spy and "CEA" agent to stop the phone company from creating the internet. A far out, acid freak out that will appeal to hep cats and squares alike!

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  Review by Evan “Kaizō Haya-shill” Pincus ★★★★

  The perfect movie for our 21st-century 5G-addled brains. You’ve gotta be really all-in on 60’s anarcho-comic modernist kitsch for this to work, so I’m probably lucky I saw this super young. Revisiting for the first time since I was 15 (and I first saw it a few years before then) - still holds up, in its own ridiculous way. This time around (benefitted by having seen actual 60’s paranoid thrillers instead of this being my first exposure) I really appreciated the new-wavey editing and camerawork, a more than credible pastiche of the formal tics of the genre, only here geared towards silliness instead of oblique nerviness. Every performance here is pure gold, but Coburn is a live wire - certainly wouldn’t say it’s his best performance, but it might be his most dynamic; he moves like Schifrin’s (great) score is being beamed directly into his skull.

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  Review by Jesse Snoddon ★★★

  "It's vital that we make the public hate the phone company "

  I had some forewarning that The President's Analyst was an odd movie, but it definitely exceeded my expectations on that front. Everything about this satirical skewering of spy movies and psychiatry is so over the top that it's hard to choose what to mention first. The script is insane. Psychiatrist Sidney Schaefer (bizarrely played by James Coburn) is called in on a top secret mission to take the job the movie's title spells out. We never see the President, but we do get a sense that the leader has some serious issues due to the frequent rate he presses his bat signal equivalent to summon Schaefer for help. The…

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  Review by Nick Langdon ★★★★ 2

  The third James Coburn film I've seen in the past few weeks, and while Cross of Iron (1977) and The Last of Sheila (1973) were both very enjoyable (albeit for very different reasons), The President's Analyst is a true cult classic and one of the strangest satires I've seen. Written and directed by Theodore J. Flicker who really should be considered the father of American improv theatre, and while Coburn was the only big star on board, he filled out the supporting cast with people he'd known through his stage work. The most notable of these fine folks is Godfrey Cambridge who is hilarious and charismatic in the film (he also gets a real showstopper of a serious monologue), and…

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  Review by T. J. Harman T. J. Harman ★★★★★

  This film is like 4 films in one. A swingin' 60s comedy, a Bond spy spoof, a left-libertarian satire of the coming police state, a psychedelic mindfuck.

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  Review by dankwit 1

  more obscure gold dug up by my longtime friend pranay, one of the newest LB reviewers

  i felt this to be a cross between skidoo and bulworth...which means it DEFINITELY isn't for everyone, but it sure as shit is for me! ripe for rediscovery (if not a remake).

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  Review by nadine smith ★★★½

  *drake vox* lately i been feeling like the president's analyst in THE PRESIDENT'S ANALYST

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  Review by RetroHound ★★★½

  Rather amusing film with James Coburn as a psychiatrist who becomes the analyst to the PotUS. Because of this position, he is on call at all times, and begins to feel the burden of all that the President has to tell him.

  Then he begins to imagine he is being watched by people of all nationalities and becomes paranoid. Well, he was right to get paranoid, everyone is after him, even the British. He gets out of the White House with a family from New Jersey who call themselves liberals but have guns. When Coburn asks why they have guns, he says "When the right-wingers disarm, we'll disarm." The house in the Jersey suburbs has a pretty wild interior. When…

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  Review by Timcop ★★★½ 3

  One of those time capsule "only-in-the-60's" movies where Our Man Flint mixes with (extremely loose) political parody and late-night talk show monologue jokes and Haight-Ashbury send ups to produce something totally psychedelic and unmoored from a more straightforward comedy. Other than possibly satirizing bureaucrats and the absurdity of the Cold War, I'm not sure exactly what the intended targets are for this type of satire, as it is too full of "meaning" to be just a conventional joke delivery system. Although the middle section with William Daniels does approach the kind of biting liberal satire that feels like a precursor to Bradley Whitford in GET OUT*, outside of the precision of that the rest of the messaging is mostly muddled.…

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  Review by teamgal ★★★★

  Hip threads, groovy pads and James Coburn’s incredible 1,000-watt smile. It’s a psychedelic, nonsensical, and frequently hilarious send-up of politics, espionage, and psychoanalysis. The paranoid thrillers of the 70s arrived early as a comedy, dressed in 60s regalia. Unique, whip-smart.

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  Review by Jim Dooley ★★★★

  In the biography of James Coburn, "Dervish Dust," it is mentioned several times that he played the gong almost as a form of recreational meditation. I knew there had to be more to it than "banging on a gong" ... and, in THE PRESIDENT'S ANALYST, his character shares a sampling (in his office) of what this was like. In short, I thought it was cool. (I wonder how much a good gong costs?)

  THE PRESIDENT'S ANALYST is a dark and biting satire (underneath its supposedly "light" spoofing) from the 1960's. It is especially scary how relevant parts of it remains today. For instance, one extended sequence involves Dr. Sidney Schaefer (Coburn) hiding out with a typical American family. The perspective…