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Burzynski: the Movie

2010 List
42% Tomatometer 12 Reviews 85% Popcornmeter 250+ Ratings

Critics Reviews

View All (12) Critics Reviews
Chuck Bowen Slant Magazine Burzynski is the kind of should've-been-important picture that you damn with the faintest praise: It means well. Rated: 2/4 Jun 6, 2010 Full Review Ronnie Scheib Variety Despite its infotainment look, Burzynski ultimately proves convincing. Jun 4, 2010 Full Review Jeannette Catsoulis New York Times Clogged with court transcripts, medical records and repetitive (if moving) patient testimony, Burzynski tickles the mind only at the cost of trampling the eyes. Rated: 2/5 Jun 4, 2010 Full Review Mark Keizer Boxoffice Magazine Burzynski may have credibility in the eyes of some, but the movie about him has no credibility, so no one will be receptive to its message. Rated: 1/5 Jun 11, 2010 Full Review Kam Williams NewsBlaze A bio-pic of Biblical proportions featuring a showdown of Dr. David versus a government Goliath! Rated: 4/4 Jun 9, 2010 Full Review Avi Offer NYC Movie Guru Provocative, eye-opening and riveting, but not well-balanced or thorough enough to persuade simple-minded skeptics of alternative treatments. Rated: 7.14/10 Jun 4, 2010 Full Review Read all reviews

Audience Reviews

View All (53) audience reviews
Blanca M This movie clearly documents the corruption motivated by greed in government & big Pharma. It clearly documents a cure for cancer but sadly Dr Bursynski has been astroturfed & as a result many have died & many others will die due to the ongoing smear campaign. This is absolutely criminal. Yet these tyrannical methods continue as evidenced in cures for AIDS & more recently COVID. I highly recommend to those suffering with Cancer but most importantly to every single American. We deserve to know how our taxes are being misused & how real heroes in the medical field are being criminalized for doing what they swore to do "save lives". Excellent movie! Rated 5 out of 5 stars 01/02/23 Full Review Audience Member Eye opening and shocking! Lots of shocking and frustrating information about the FDA practices. Same practices as with the food industry. This is a must watch! Rated 5 out of 5 stars 01/20/23 Full Review Audience Member If you know anyone facing cancer you should watch this film. If you want to find out some of the evil deeds of the Food and Drug Administration and the National Cancer Institute are watch this film. Rated 5 out of 5 stars 02/09/23 Full Review Audience Member Amazon has a median 5 star review. For powerful content, surprised to see otherwise here. I thought this delivered a clear case of the FDA's attempt to ruin Dr. Burzynski while attempting to steal his patents & block his legal treatment of patients who, despite their death sentence prognosis & daunting chemo/radiation options from standard medical institutions, were improving and/or in remission under Burzynski's care. After 3 federal grand juries, & 60M in tax payer $$ spent, ultimately the FDA had nothing on the Dr. Shame on the American Cancer Society and FDA! Rated 4 out of 5 stars 02/22/23 Full Review Audience Member Makes me so sad to live in this world driven by money. The FDA simply has no incentive to allow cancer to be 'cured' now or ever publicly. God help our society and the only hope is more and more people see this movie (part 1 and 2) and spread the word and then that generation comes into power to make change. Rated 5 out of 5 stars 02/15/23 Full Review Audience Member Burzynski: Cancer Is Serious Business comes to you from the pen of Eric Merola, an advertising art director who did graphics and art on his brother's stylistically similar Zeitgeist: The Movie. The pair seem to have cornered the market in Conspiracy: With Colons. This movie could, like Zeitgeist, be viewed as comedy, a ripe source of mockery of the conspiracist mind, if it were not for the fact that lives are literally at stake. Stanislaw Burzynski has spent over forty years investigating his "antineoplaston" therapy, during which time he has registered over sixty human trials - none of these trials has been published, and what little he has published is of insufficient quality to establish that antineoplastons are worth serious investigation, let alone effective. Other reviewers have noted that Merola seems to be unable to distinguish documentary from advertorial. That is a charitable interpretation. The film is naked propaganda, and not even in a good cause. Merola apparently encountered Burzynski when his cousin was a patient. He is clearly a True Believer. His treatment of Burzynski goes beyond uncritical and well into the area of hagiography. The thesis of the film is that Burzynski is a Brave Maverick Doctor who has stumbled on the cure for cancer, and is being suppressed by the "cancer industry" including the FDA. This claim is frankly implausible: it requires a conspiracy involving, at a conservative estimate, hundreds of thousands of people working for Federal agencies, other governments around the world, cancer charities, university research departments, and of course the cranks' favourite bogeyman, "Big Pharma". There are so many different individuals involved with so many different imperatives that a unified conspiracy is self-evidently a silly idea. The idea that a genuinely promising new drug would be found only by one man, and never by any of the tens of thousands of others in the field, is silly. Science doesn't work that way. We're conditioned to think of science in terms of its Einsteins and Newtons, but their discoveries were only the first, each discovery would have come along usually within a year or two from the mind of another. If something this simple was actually as powerful as Burzynski claims, it is pretty much inconceivable that nobody else would have noticed, even with Burzynski's lacklustre publication record. Cancer victims are uniquely vulnerable. A terminal diagnosis is, literally, a death sentence. Merola turns this caprice of nature around and claims that the death sentence is pronounced by doctors, not by your body. It's seductive, and the movie undoubtedly helps persuade people to part with the hundreds of thousands of dollars Burzynski charges, but in the end there is no credible evidence that it works. The cherry-picked anecdotes of survivors weaken when you realise that (a) cancer is very variable and early prognoses are less accurate than later ones; (b) at least on of the patients did not have a positive biopsy so may not actually have had cancer anyway; (c) most of the patients have also had conventional therapies including surgery; (d) other patients used in this way have subsequently died and been dropped like a hot potato by the clinic. Burzynski is not even useful to the student of film. As a conspiracist propaganda film Zeitgeist is a much better example. Burzynski does not stand comparison with other well known propaganda films such as Triumph des Willens, it lacks the budget and I'm afraid Merola lacks the creative spark of Riefenstahl.So Burzynski fails as an example of propaganda, fails woefully as a documentary and in the end is just a long-form version of a late-night cable TV infomercial. Rated 0.5 out of 5 stars 01/14/23 Full Review Read all reviews
Burzynski: the Movie

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Movie Info

Director
Eric Merola