Body of War Critic Reviews

To say the least, the film is awkward, like a piece of badly assembled Ikea furniture. Still, editor Bernadine Colish weaves together all that C-SPAN footage into a disturbing procedural indictment. Legislators use the same language - often the president's - to justify the rush to war. The repetition is comical until it's scary: They're parroting.Read the full review

Body Of War purposefully depicts an America in turmoil. But it also depicts an America far more capable of living with contradictions than the "Red State/Blue State"-obsessed cable-news pundits would have us believe.Read the full review

Joins the growing mass of excellent, disturbing and achingly sad documentaries about the Iraq conflict.Read the full review

By documenting the difficult life of their paraplegic subject, helmers Ellen Spiro and Phil Donahue succeed in personalizing some of the war's grim statistics, but the purview of their portrait feels too limited for the pic to play widely.Read the full review

Politics recede in the face of the realities of Young's life, and Spiro and Donahue would have succeeded in making the same point had they omitted all but his day-to-day existence. Together, however, they comprise a powerful indictment of the tactical politics that led to the invasion and a heartbreaking account of one man's living with the aftermath.Read the full review

This movie wants to help make things better. But it also -- fervently, and for a purpose -- holds a grudge.Read the full review

There's never any mistaking the film's politics. If they were any different, it would be a surprise, given that the co-director and executive producer is the onetime talk-show god and lifelong liberal Donahue. But it is a film (as opposed to a collection of talking heads, Michael Moore-style ambushes or Robert Greenwaldian shorthand).Read the full review