The Prisoner or: How I Planned to Kill Tony Blair Critic Reviews

Eight months of interrogation and torture in fetid Abu Ghraib followed before he was released, innocent. None of The Prisoner's showy flourishes -- animation, sound effects, fancy editing -- can match the power of Abbas' stillness as he describes one man's agony in one huge hell.Read the full review

It's an angry story, but also a strangely hopeful one, in the sense of new life sprouting through a battlefield. Above all, it's personal and specific, and that IS news we can use.Read the full review

While the documentary isn't as compelling as its source material, Abbas tells an interesting story about his incarceration.Read the full review

The Prisoner is in many ways a justifiably angry film, simmering with moral outrage. But it is also -- surprisingly, maybe even amazingly -- hopeful.Read the full review

What's troubling about the film's technique is its lack of context; we must take Yuris, who speaks serviceable English, pretty much at his word. What's troubling about his story is its ring of truth.Read the full review

It is a film rich in detail, the kind that simply never emerges in the nightly news accounts of the war.Read the full review

By recounting Abbas' ordeal as an endless inarticulate monologue, The Prisoner reduces it to a dull anecdote--timely and relevant, perhaps, but an anecdote all the same.Read the full review

The film becomes a dizzying descent into a world of contradictions, military illogic and ineffectual bureaucracy.Read the full review