“The all-archive film is fast and funny with a propulsive 90s-inspired soundtrack. It’s thoughtful, too, in the connections it draws between this bizarre relic of cultural history and the preventable disasters the world has experienced since.”

— Simran Hans,

“Enormously entertaining…’Y2K’ may not have been the end of the world, but McDonald and Becker brilliantly illustrate how fragile a society we have, less so for its technology than the public discourse.”

— Stephen Saito,

“A sleek, lean film that never falters.”

— Scott Phillips,

“Time Bomb Y2K uses archival footage from the late 1990s to reconstruct what happened and why, and the results are often comical. But what it establishes, subtly, is something much darker: that while we were all focused on a bug, the seeds of all kinds of today’s plagues were taking root, from radical nationalism and gun fervor to mass inattention to the climate crisis to the undermining of expertise and authority. The movie ends on a positive note, one that looks toward the future, but it’s bittersweet all these years later.”

— Alissa Wilkinson,

“Moving at a fast clip, it’s an unabashedly fun ride — as much a mirror of our current cultural nostalgia for the 90s/aughts as it is a thorough historical account.”

— Saelyx Finna,

“Becker and McDonald aren’t always playing things for jokes or being overly serious, instead presenting the truth that lies between those extremes. People are still getting used to such omnipresent levels of interconnectedness, and Time Bomb Y2K looks at the flashpoint where that shift in culture met up with social issues and technological imperfections in a huge way.”

— Andrew Parker,

“The Y2K bug could be a teachable moment; instead, it’s already an artifact for reasons that go way beyond laughing at primitive webcam streaming. Time Bomb manages to convey all of this clearly without voiceover, title cards or sledgehammer-heavy editorial juxtaposition, a feat that’s impressive in its legibility.”

— Vadim Rizov,