The Devil and Father Amorth

The Devil and Father Amorth starts to feel slippery, as Friedkin uses the sliver offered by psychologists and neurologists as a pry bar to crack open space for the supernatural.

The Devil and Father Amorth feels at once bloated and slight, like a DVD supplement puffed up to feature length.

Despite Friedkin's pedigree, it seems to have been made by someone who's never seen a movie before.

Regardless of whether you were raised in the church and believe in God and the devil, there's a chilling air of taboo voyeurism in all of this.

If this documentary celebrates a crackpot, Mr. Friedkin is his match. The director's blabbermouth tendencies and wry manner make him an enjoyable M.C.

This would be an interesting subject to explore at length, with a host who didn't seem to be padding an opportunity for self-promotion with the trappings of science.

While providing incredibly rare insight, The Devil and Father Amorth is an overly-jumbled, overwrought documentary experience whose reach unfortunately exceeds its grasp.

No sense of gothic mystery is to be found with not a single artfully shot frame in the entire film. (Remember, The Exorcist was so well shot that they actually used a film still as the poster and it's stunning.)

William Friedkin's audio-enhanced documentary about an actual exorcism is a lukewarm flop.

Whether this is a documentary or a witty found-footage style thriller, it's a lot of fun.

Friedken explores the origins of The Exorcist. Anyone who's seen even one of the hundreds of documentaries about the making of that classic... will not find anything new here.

Longer than a bonus feature for the already exhaustively-presented Exorcist, but not quite long or complex enough to be the feature-length exploration of real exorcisms it aspires to be - effectively, an infomercial for his earlier work.