Critic Reviews

• Tom Keogh, Seattle Times

  This is an important film, but be prepared for shocks.

• Mark Olsen, Los Angeles Times

  Arguably the most vital and eye-opening documentary yet made regarding the United States' current military entanglement.

• Terry Lawson, Detroit Free Press

  The film is one of the most urgent and immediate nonfiction works we may ever see.

• Amy Biancolli, Houston Chronicle

  No matter what you think of the U.S. presence in Iraq, the film will disturb or startle or dismay you.

• Colin Covert, Minneapolis Star Tribune

  A riveting firsthand look at the conflict on the battlefield, in the barracks, and on the home front, unfiltered by any partisan prejudice.

• Eleanor Ringel Gillespie, Atlanta Journal-Constitution

  A remarkable film, a you-are-there document that allows us to worry about the soldier who's risking his life even as we ponder the rights and wrongs of this military engagement.

• Jay Antani, Cinema Writer

  The direct-cinema authenticity that a soldier's eye gives to this largely street-fought war...lends The War Tapes its primary strength.

• Fernando F. Croce, CinePassion

  Intentionally or not, the movie locates a strain of ignorance to go along with the bravery

• Amy Nicholson, I.E. Weekly

  They expected tension; what they didn't expect was to serve out their year-long deployment as, essentially, the world's most targeted grocery store security.

• Karina Longworth, Cinematical

  The director has managed to shape real people's lives into a drama, without imposing ideological filters, and without sacrificing what makes them real.

• Cynthia Fuchs, PopMatters

  If the in-country chaos has beginnings and endings, its effects are, as Steve Pink says, "lasting."

• Rex Roberts, Film Journal International

  Gripping, boring, disturbing, amusing, enlightening and frustrating.

• William Arnold, Seattle Post-Intelligencer

  A scary diary of their increasingly dehumanized daily lives (mostly spent protecting supply convoys on the dangerous highways) and the movie evokes the futile larger war around them in a series of haunting images.

• Wade Major, Boxoffice Magazine

  What's here speaks for itself, and what it says is often surprising and deeply unsettling, regardless of one's political leanings.

• Bob Strauss, Los Angeles Daily News

  Informative as most of the partisan-produced, anti-war documentaries that we've seen in the last several years have been, none match this one for its wide-ranging scope and lived-it-at-ground-zero truth.

• Andy Klein, Los Angeles CityBeat

  ...it would make a great double bill with the recent My Country, My Country, which looks at things from the other side.

• Tim Grierson, L.A. Weekly

  The film succeeds because of its refreshingly low-key emotional approach and its refusal to impose character arcs or political agendas on its subjects' footage.

• Ross Anthony, Hollywood Report Card

  Universally Worthwhile -- not just as a documentary on this war. But as a documentary on this war, I think it's quite interestingly balanced.

• Duane Dudek, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

  A painfully intimate snapshot of who they are, the damage they inflict on an unseen enemy and what they endure while doing so, in all its absurd, dehumanizing and ennobling contradictions.

• Toddy Burton, Austin Chronicle

  As raw and disturbing as it is wry and satirical, the resulting portrait is a powerfully unique film that goes beyond commenting on Operation Iraqi Freedom to become a provocative meditation on war itself.

Read all 21 critic reviews