Critic Reviews

• Nell Minow, Chicago Sun-Times

  Good intentions often make bad movies.

• Tasha Robinson, Chicago Tribune

  The filmmakers split time between history and personal drama in ways that do full service to neither.

• Joshua Land, Time Out New York

  Its heart firmly in the right place, O Jerusalem proves an uneasy mix of history and fiction.

• Marta Barber, Miami Herald

  In trying to be sensitive to such a controversial issue, O Jerusalem glazes over important events settling for mediocrity while giving a history lesson more appropriate for high school.

• Linda Matchan, Boston Globe

  It aspires to be an epic drama but suffers from an acute identity crisis: It can't decide if it wants to be history, drama, or a cry for peace in the Mideast.

• Desson Thomson, Washington Post

  It's hard to take the film seriously with [its] contrivances, including a hokey music score, dialogue designed solely to give us historical information.

• Michael Sragow, Baltimore Sun

  O Jerusalem is as overstated and expository as a historical pageant, from the drippy music to a sputtering, running gag involving funky old jalopies to clichéd speeches and teary-eyed deaths and a final voice-over crying out for peace.

• Jordan Hiller, Bangitout.com

  I felt as though I could have gathered the same information about Israel's beginnings from a pamphlet, and saved myself the film's forthright baggage

• Frederic and Mary Ann Brussat, Spirituality and Practice

  A hopeful and helpful movie that depicts the friendship between a Jew and an Arab that outlasts the winds of war and the culture of revenge and racial hatred surrounding them.

• Daniel M. Kimmel, The Jewish Advocate

  The need to touch on pivotal events makes this at times seem like history's 'greatest hits,' although the personal stories provide a narrative thread tying it all together.

• Ella Taylor, L.A. Weekly

  Director Elie Chouraqui and co-writer Didier Lepecheur [fall] prey to a fatal evenhandedness that reduces a complex battle for the loveliest, most fought-over city in the world to a pile of heroic clichés.

• Phil Hall, EDGE Boston

  As a history lesson, the film is so elementary and silly that you'd half-expect to find Mr. Peabody and Sherman peeking around the Wailing Wall.

• Ken Fox, TV Guide's Movie Guide

  Such fictionalizations are the stuff of TV miniseries, and only serve to add confusion and melodrama to a history that, as Collins and Lapierre's book proves, hardly needs further dramatization.

Read all 13 critic reviews