Critic Reviews

• Rene Rodriguez, Miami Herald

  Ghosts of Cite Soleil is too brief and limited in scope to provide a complete picture of Haiti's turbulent history, but its images of how so many of its citizens live and die on a daily basis -- is both heartbreaking and unforgettable.

• Ted Fry, Seattle Times

  More horrific than any tale from the crypt Hollywood could conceive.

• Derek Adams, Time Out

  Leth's gritty, haphazardly edited film plays like a music video, with jagged rap sequences interlaced with urgent handheld Super 8-style footage and a stonking shanty-blues soundtrack.

• Kevin Crust, Los Angeles Times

  An expressionistic portrait of a society in violent chaos, the film blends cinà (C)ma và (C)rità (C) and newsreel footage to capture a modern-day tragedy with Shakespearean overtones.

• Elizabeth Weitzman, New York Daily News

  [An] indelible documentary, which dives into the brutal heart of a place most people would avoid at all cost.

• Rafer Guzman, Newsday

  The director, Asger Leth, isn't terribly organized, but he puts us smack in the middle of everything: petty squabbles, horrible riots, casual shootings, even a love triangle.

• Marty Mapes, Movie Habit

  Packs an emotional punch, but that only partly makes up for the lack of a good story

• Prairie Miller, NewsBlaze

  Besides anti-Aristide diatribes mouthed a little too much on cue by these hooligans, there's also a French female relief worker mostly providing sexual relief to a gabby gangster. Not to mention 'relief worker' often as Third World code word for CIA spy.

• Prairie Miller, NewsBlaze

  Besides anti-Aristide diatribes mouthed a little too much on cue by these hooligans, there's also a French female relief worker mostly providing sexual relief to a gabby gangster. Not to mention 'relief worker' often as Third World code word for CIA spy.

• Jeff Vice, Deseret News, Salt Lake City

  Ghosts of Cite Soleil is a curiously unfocused, rambling film that never really settles on exactly what it wants to say or exactly which stories it wants to tell.

• Sean Means, Salt Lake Tribune

  Leth ... gets us so close to life in Cité Soleil that we practically can hear the bullets and smell the garbage.

• Shawn Levy, Oregonian

  There's an immediacy to Ghosts of the Cite Soleil that's exceedingly rare for a documentary of any stripe.

• Bill White, Seattle Post-Intelligencer

  Dutch director Leth is so enamored of the ugliness of it all that he doesn't even try to penetrate the noisy bravado that obscures the patches of truth that lie beneath the surface.

• Robin Clifford, Reeling Reviews

  The ultra-violence of this microcosm [gang] society is what Ghosts is all about.

• Laura Clifford, Reeling Reviews

  This flashy looking documentary scored by Haitian singer Wyclef Jean is such a frightening inside look at a poverty stricken society ruled by violence that it is a marvel that it got made.

• Steve Watson, Little White Lies

  Goes beyond front-line journalism to show the men behind the guns.

• Stuart McGurk, thelondonpaper

  Intimate and terrifying, at points almost expressionistic and surreal, this is never less than a nerve-shredding experience. It even includes an (improbable) love story.

• Derek Malcolm, This is London

  Leth shows us the horrendous nature of the period but fails to provide much necessary political analysis, without which it is even more deeply depressing than it might have been.

• Anthony Quinn, Independent

  A garbled account of state-aided terror that sheds little light on these dogs of war.

• , Sun Online

  While Leth's guerrilla-style documentary is gripping to watch, it isn't particularly well-structured and constantly loses focus

Read all 21 critic reviews