The Ground Truth: Critic Reviews

Amid the continuing deluge of documentaries about the war in Iraq, Patricia Foulkrod's film The Ground Truth stands out as an especially pointed indictment of the American military's treatment of its own people on and off the battlefield.

The voices of these brave young people reverberate hauntingly.

Mostly a string of talking-head interviews, but those talking heads -- more than 16 men and women -- are compelling.

The documentary any American with an opinion on our involvement in Iraq owes it to his or her conscience to see.

Patricia Foulkrod's film backs itself into a Support Our Troops corner, elegizing the soldiers. Iraqis do not figure in, except as bad memories.

Films like Top Gun and newscasts of 9/11 motivated some Americans to enlist. Thoughtful documentaries like The Ground Truth urge the rest of us to shoulder the consequences.

Thanks largely to the brutal honesty of its subjects, The Ground Truth transcends the protest genre and delivers a much broader cautionary tale.

The substance of the movie is potent, and so powerfully presented by those who have fought and are still fighting a controversial war, that the message of Ground Truth cannot be dismissed.

Those vets certainly deserve to be heard, but virtually every scene of the film tells us something we already knew.

A stunning statement on how we mistreat our best and bravest young men.

This thoughtful, sensitive film, perhaps the most emotionally wrenching of all the Iraq documentaries, could have been made after any war.

Sobering.

"The success of The Ground Truth lies in the courageously open and honest interviewees, but it works because of Rob Hall's editing, which not only compiles for us a perfectly evidential collection of footage but does so at a pace that doesn't dilly-dally

This film is effective because it doesn't rely on statistics, but rather interviews with soldiers, interspersed with combat footage.

Um retrato impactante das feridas de guerra invisiveis e do descaso com que o governo Bush lida com aqueles que finge honrar.

The Ground Truth: After the Killing Ends makes up in raw anger what it lacks in objectivity.