Critic Reviews

• Betsy Sharkey, Los Angeles Times

  A picture of a complex mind with a gift for capturing humanity and inhumanity with heartbreaking force.

• Lisa Kennedy, Denver Post

  As chock-full of insights -- from Peter Jennings, Peter Arnett, Gordon Parks among others -- it is the famed war photojournalist's works that still create space to be startled, to be rewired.

• John Anderson, Variety

  It's their reminiscences that are the most poignant and revealing about a man who seems, in Cooper's interviews, to have done all he could to conceal himself.

• V.A. Musetto, New York Post

  In the documentary An Unlikely Weapon, Adams and people such as Tom Brokaw, Peter Jennings and Morley Safer talk extensively about his career as a photojournalist for The Associated Press and later for Time, Parade and even Penthouse.

• Joe Neumaier, New York Daily News

  The man had stories to tell, in person and in his pictures.

• Nathan Lee, New York Times

  The strongest material in An Unlikely Weapon contemplates the import of that shot, and of photojournalism itself, on the events of its time.

• Avi Offer, NYC Movie Guru

  Those previously unfamiliar with Eddie Adams will be mostly fascinated and somewhat intrigued, but, for everyone else, An Unlikely Weapon serves merely as a pedantic, Reader's Digest version of Adams' career rather than as truly revealing and illuminating

• Frank Lovece, Film Journal International

  Documentary about the Pulitzer Prize-winning photojournalist and celebrity-portrait photographer Eddie Adams, whose image of a 1968 street execution in Saigon became an icon of the Vietnam War.

• Paul Brenner, Filmcritic.com

  Adams, one of the great American photojournalists, is more than deserving of a documentary tribute. Unfortunately, for all its good intentions, An Unlikely Weapon is not that documentary

• Nick Schager, The Screengrab

  Though Morgan's non-fiction techniques are only serviceably straightforward, the director engagingly makes clear that Adams' most renowned image haunted him but did not, ultimately, define his work.

• Cole Smithey, ColeSmithey.com

  Photographer Eddie Adams is the subject of Susan Morgan Cooper's incisive documentary about the man who took the picture credited with helping bring an end to the Vietnam War.

• Eric Henderson, Slant Magazine

  Serves as a fairly surface-oriented hagiography of a self-conscious rock star photographer.

Read all 12 critic reviews