Trouble the Water: Critic Reviews

Essential, unique viewing: a stunning experience of the hurricane and its aftermath, rooted in immediate personal response and emotions that encapsulate the full national catastrophe.

Tia Lessin and Carl Deal's movie about Hurricane Katrina is, in its way, quite as powerful as Spike Lee's massive documentary on the subject.

The resilience of the movie's subjects -- survivors of street crime and drugs and HIV -- irradiates Trouble the Water like sunshine.

Using mostly amateur video shot by an aspiring rap artist and her husband in the lead-up to Hurricane Katrina and in the weeks after, this gripping, sometimes unstructured doc shows the devastation New Orleans residents suffered in the swirl of the storm.

Filmmakers Tia Lessin and Carl Deal have fashioned a deeply moving story of resilience and redemption.

You can't help wanting -- and maybe needing -- to read into her indomitable spiritedness something like a reason for hope. For her, for other Katrina survivors, for all of us.

A tale of natural and civic catastrophe, Trouble the Water is also a frank yet inspired saga about poverty, survival and what lies beyond.

Trouble the Water is ineradicably moving.

Trouble the Water, along with Spike Lee's extraordinary four-hour epic, When the Levees Broke, remains one of the most eloquent records we have of a tragedy that brought out some of the most impressively alive men and women in New O

Roberts needs more practice at holding the camera steady and framing shots. It doesn't matter. We feel her footage at the base of our spines.

Trouble the Water is choppy, overly long and at times almost indecipherable, but it's indelible.

Trouble the Water proves that a couple of gutsy amateurs with a home video camera can work wonders.

[Subject Kimberly] Roberts' vid reps some of the more extensive by any Katrina survivor.

I thought Spike Lee's When the Levees Broke was pretty much the last word on the national tragedy and disgrace that followed Hurricane Katrina's assault on New Orleans. Maybe not.

It's not quite a Grapes of Wrath for our times, but Trouble the Water does give a voice to people America didn't see or listen to before Katrina.

'God's gonna trouble the water,' goes the chorus from the African-American spiritual that gives Trouble the Water its title, but no deity is to blame for the tide of bureaucratic bungling and inhumanity the movie reveals.

The person at the centre emerges as a force of nature unto herself. Meet, and prepare to be inspired by, Kimberly Rivers Roberts.

What Lessin and Deal provide is a considered structure that places Roberts' footage within a larger social and emotional context as part of a self-defined life, in which Hurricane Katrina was both tragedy and opportunity.

A spellbinder you do not want to miss.

More than a keenly dramatic look at how this country treats the poor and dispossessed. It's also a film that was hijacked by its subjects. They saw an opportunity, they took it, and the grand jury prize at Sundance was the result.

The most affecting footage of Hurricane Katrina ever seen comes from an amateur camcorder bought on the street for twenty bucks.

It's a view of the disaster that no amount of news coverage would ever manage to capture.

An utterly magnificent film, one that is as hard to forget as it is to ignore. As such, it is destined to live a long life, in peoples' minds and on scholars' shelves.

Intensely gripping footage of the calamitous Hurricane Katrina and the compelling story of survivors Kimberly and Scott Roberts make this a must see documetary.

Trouble the Water is a truly gobsmacking document, but it's Kimberly Roberts who carries the film.