Ron Rosenbaum prefers the HBO-Borat to the movie version:
[T]o me the original Borat segments were more than stupid-funny; they were extremely smart-funny, occasionally even off-handedly profound, as the fake Kazakh newsman “personality” managed to tease out moments of appalling honesty from ordinary Americans with a light touch and brilliant comic timing that made it not about him, about Borat, being a clueless foreigner, but about us being clueless Americans. Not even clueless so much as naively blind to our own implicit smugness.While Borat One [the HBO version] gave you brilliant comic intelligence, Borat Two [the movie version] gives you ass-in-your-face (and I mean that literally) grossness from an aggressively, smugly dumb foreigner. Borat One had at least a touch of the sweetness of Andy Kaufman’s Latka, his “Foreign Man,” incarnation. Borat Two, alas, is more Yakov Smirnoff hammily exploiting his accent. They botched the joke.