from rotten tomatoes:
W (Oliver Stone)"An absorbing and weirdly enjoyable portrait of a slight, meritless man and his calamitous presidency."

"Weirdly enjoyable?" Well, yes, I'll agree that by the end I was appreciating it. But midway, I had to take a break and walk away from the TV. My whole face was lifting into the W grimace, lifting my upper lip but not baring the teeth. In the kitchen I asked myself out loud if I could stand to see any more of it. About an hour later I watched the rest.

Finally I could see the satire in it. For example, Thandie Newton's frowning, mouth-askew Condoleeza Rice: It was ridiculous. Which seems just right to me. A woman of Rice's touted intellect remaining and working faithfully for such a criminally inept man IS ridiculous. So now we have a portrait of it.

Josh Brolin is really good at playing nasty men, which he demonstrated in this and in No Country For Old Men. I've read that Christian Bale was originally cast for the part, and he is also great at nasty -- but after his publicized verbal abuse of a film worker who made a mistake on his movie set, I guess Bale's so good at nasty because he IS nasty. If Bale had played this role I would have been pondering what effect it has on a film to cast an actor who really belongs in action movies of cartoon figures. But of course this might have been very interesting.

Oliver Stone left out the cocaine use, and generally seems to have held back in this film. But is it holding back when you show Laura Bush calmly asking her husband, "Do you have to throw up?" one morning after a party, in the most perfectly tolerant tone, which says she has seen this countless times before, expects to see it again, and it is not enough to spoil her day, a tone emblematic of her acceptance of all his corrupt, vile, world-destroying ways in all their years together after. (Yes I am a liberal.)

A light touch is often sufficient, and sometimes required, like telling a joke with a straight face. I like this movie as much as -- no, maybe not quite as much -- as American Splendor.

The end scenes are gifts we absolutely deserve for enduring watching an entire movie about someone whom I hold in such un-esteem* (a word I use as a nod to this world leader who has actually brought about the real-life use of the language of 1984). These end scenes are Bush's nightmares, and they're laughable. No, he's not dreaming of the cries of the stem cells. I won't say, but hope others bother to watch the movie.
*should probably be, "double-plus unesteem" to be accurate