Reception
The late critic Gene Siskel rated Crumb as the best film of the year. Roger Ebert gave the film four (of four) stars, writing that "Crumb is a film that gives new meaning to the notion of art as therapy." In The Washington Post, Desson Howe's review was similarly positive. The San Francisco Chronicle rated the film as "wild applause", as critic Edward Guthmann called the film "one of the most provocative, haunting documentaries of the last decade." He also noted that Robert Crumb and wife Aline had drawn a "scornful" cartoon about the film in The New Yorker.
Critic Jeffrey M. Anderson called it "one of the most brave and honest films I've ever seen", and listed its characteristics as those of "great documentary", giving it four (of four) stars. Anderson (later critic for the San Francisco Examiner) later placed the film on his list of the ten greatest films of all time, labeling it "the greatest documentary ever made."
Despite strong reviews, Crumb was not nominated for the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature (the nominating committee reportedly stopped watching the film after only twenty minutes). The Oscar snub of Crumb, and the same year's equally acclaimed Hoop Dreams, caused a media furor which forced the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences to revamp its documentary nomination process. Zwigoff stated in an interview that: “The Academy Award thing had much more to do with the fact that at the time, a lot of the documentary membership was made up of distributors of documentary films. The rules have changed since then. But they would just vote for the films they distributed because it was in their financial interest to do so.” He continued: “I just assumed they were disgusted with the film."
In 2008, Entertainment Weekly named Crumb the 14th best film of the last 25 years. In 2012 Slant Magazine ranked the film #74 on its list of the 100 Best Films of the 1990s, calling it "Arguably the greatest of all nonfiction films."
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