Redacted: Critic Reviews

Brian De Palma's Redacted traffics in, and clearly means to provoke, strong, unbalanced emotions.

Although Redacted has intensity and seriousness of purpose, it brings us no closer to, or even thoughtfully further away from, its subject.

A crude, unbearably smug attempt to provoke outrage from a filmmaker desperate to be relevant again.

The most authentic thing about Redacted is the rage with which it was made.

More significant in its sense of purpose than its uneven execution.

Critics have called the movie crude and punishing. All right, the defense concedes all that, but the movie does a harrowing job of depicting the psychological toll of the occupation on both Iraqis and U.S. soldiers.

Redacted is hell to sit through, but I think De Palma is bravely trying to imagine his way inside an atrocity, and that he's onto something powerful with his multisided approach.

The result of the film is shocking, saddening and frustrating.

It's an effective experiment and a hackle-raising drama, and it's far better controlled than De Palma's last film, the flailing noir mess The Black Dahlia.

It shows rare courage in protesting the widespread abuse of innocent Iraqis, but its pseudodocumentary form is full of awkward misfires and its acting is often terrible.

DePalma's movie offers its own doctoring and processing, without delivering an ounce of real humanity -- good or bad -- in the bargain.

Redacted, director Brian DePalma's ugly little Iraq War movie, wastes an interesting approach on trite, crude and painfully superficial content.

Curiously, Mr. De Palma makes very little effort to comprehend the wrongdoers in his version of Iraq. Their vile language and clear class inferiority distance them from any pity or understanding from the average audience member.

Deeply felt but dramatically unconvincing.

De Palma is extreme, visceral, usually in bad taste but almost always riveting.

Where Casualties of War had the swooning formal elegance of an opium dream, Redacted adopts the fractured fitfulness of a seizure.

I think it's safe to suggest no other war could have produced a movie like this.

Of all the war-themed pictures that have been released so far this fall, it stands apart, and it stands alone: Redacted is confrontational, rough, immediate and confounding.

Shocking and deeply moving film about an incident in Iraq.

Redacted might have been more compelling if De Palma had redacted himself a bit -- if he hadn't been so overt, if he'd given us enough credit to think for ourselves and come to our own conclusions about these men and the choices they made.

The movie is a cry of national shame; for [director] De Palma, it's a new badge of honor for a wily old vet.

This film is kind of a mess. Even if you agree with its politics, you will probably weep at the ineptitude of it all.

Brian De Palma's feature-length fictionalized polemic, Redacted, expresses its outrage with a ferocity that takes mainstream protest of the Iraq war into new territory.