The Final Year Gives an Insider’s Perspective of the Obama Presidency

Greg Barker's documentary, The Final Year, was reviewed in Vulture:

There is a persistent charge that the quietly devastating, on-the-fly documentary The Final Year, covering January 2016 to January 2017 in the administration of Barack Obama, is a piece of propaganda — which is valid only if you believe that portraying U.N. Ambassador Samantha Power, Deputy National Security Adviser Ben Rhodes, Secretary of State John Kerry, and the president himself as idealists determined to carry the ball forward on climate change, human rights, and arms reduction is fundamentally misleading. If so — if you think that they’re saboteurs pursuing a hidden agenda (say, strengthening Sharia, weakening the U.S. in the Middle East, and furthering the climate-change hoax) — then nothing in Greg Barker’s film will satisfy you (and there is no help for you, in any case). The rest of us will appreciate this swift, insiderish view of the achievements, mistakes, and compromises that make the Obama legacy alternately exhilarating and depressing. Hovering over all is an invisible anvil: the coming election of a president bent on undoing every last element of what the people onscreen are busy accomplishing.