The Road to Guantanamo: Critic Reviews

...oddly unilluminating.

The Road to Guantanamo, based on the testimony of three British Muslims captured in Afghanistan in 2001, is a wrenching and dismaying account of cruelty and bureaucratic indifference.

A riveting and disturbing documentary that falls short of greatness by not providing enough insight into the characters.

As pure documentary, the film brilliantly conjures without romanticization the chaos, squalor and fragility of Pakistan on the edge of what is just about to become a war zone.

Road to Guantanamo is chilling as a snapshot of how the world changed for average Arab and Muslim men after 9/11.

Although the Tiptons are ultimately unbroken after two years in prison camp, The Road to Guantanamo is one of the most oppressive accounts of life in a military detention.

The movie begins as a not very compelling or particularly convincing road movie, and turns into a riveting prison drama.

Watching this melange of journalism and dramatic license can be enthralling and maddening at the same time, because the ring of truth, which the film has, is not the same as the truth, which remains unknown.

Winterbottom's re-enactors do a persuasive job of depicting young men whose ad hoc decision to travel from Pakistan to Afghanistan put them solidly in the wrong-place/wrong-time category.

In the Gitmo depicted by filmmakers Michael Winterbottom and Mat Whitecross, all prisoners, guilty and innocent, are treated with such systematic sadism that taking one's life is arguably a proportionate response.

This expose of American sadism is a shocker, but the movie doesn't bring us any closer to understanding the abuse that is carried out in our names.

A bracing docu-drama.

The moviemakers tell the trio's engrossing story with a mix of battering immediacy, precision and discretion that puts you totally in the movie's grip.

While not an altogether convincing character study of the three detainees, Guantanamo is a nonetheless chilling indictment.

Your view of its accuracy depends entirely on how truthful you feel the narrators are. I found it easy to believe the general outlines of their stories. In times of war, bad things don't happen only to bad people.

Powerfully co-directed by Michael Winterbottom and Mat Whitecross, the film has a winning combo of excitement and topicality.

The Road to Guantanamo is a missed opportunity. This is a subject that deserves a more thoughtful documentary or docudrama, not a hastily thrown together amalgam of the two.

It actually displays a remarkable rectitude when it comes to dramatizing its subjects' ordeal.

A British docudrama that is as provocative as it is timely.

The Road to Guantanamo will drive you crazy, if you aren't crazy yet.

[An] occasionally murky but always engrossing film.

This remarkable film by Michael Winterbottom and Mat Whitecross tracks the true story of these British citizens of Pakistani descent, using hundreds of hours of interviews so the story can come out, literally, in their own words.

Although its methodology raises some questions, The Road to Guantanamo provides a riveting glimpse into a heavily shrouded political and moral quagmire that deepens by the day.

The director's slovenliness is a torture device of its own, but the grueling point is well taken