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Operation Homecoming: Writing the Wartime Experience

EMAILPRINTThe Documentary Group

Operation Homecoming: Writing the Wartime Experience reviews
71
10.0 User Score:

Generally favorable reviews

Based on 9 critic reviews
How did we calculate this?

Based on 3 votes
Read user comments
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Movie Info

Genre(s): Documentary

Written by:

Directed by: Richard E. Robbins

Release Date:
Theatrical: February 9, 2007

Running Time: 81 minutes, Color

Origin: USA

Summary

RATING: Not Rated

Starring Edward “Parker” Gyokeres, Ed Hrivnak, John McCary, and Lt. Col. Mike Strobl

This unique documentary explores the firsthand accounts of American soldiers through their own words. The film is built upon a project created by the National Endowment for the Arts to gather the writing of soldiers and their families who have participated in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

What The Critics Said

All critic scores are converted to a 100-point scale. If a critic does not indicate a score, we assign a score based on the general impression given by the text of the review. Learn more...

100

Entertainment Weekly Owen Gleiberman

No film can ''capture'' the experience of combat, but this eloquent and moving documentary brings us closer to the emotions (principally boredom and terror) of the soldiers fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan than perhaps any previous examination.

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83

The Onion (A.V. Club) Staff (Not credited)

The cumulative effect of Operation Homecoming is to bring to light the soldiers' collective experiences and the enduring nightmares they suffer in our place.

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75

Boston Globe Janice Page

Hits far more marks than it misses. And no work has brought viewers deeper inside the psychology of war.

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70

The New York Times Stephen Holden

The best pieces portray combat as such a heightened sensory experience that it demands to be written about, and they suggest that war can turn ordinary men who wouldn’t think of keeping diaries into latter-day Hemingways.

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70

Village Voice Ed Gonzalez

These stories of heartache, confusion, and anger combine to form a gallery of art that illuminates the conundrums of warfare and testifies to the philosophical instincts of the American soldier.

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70

Salon.com Andrew O'Hehir

Operation Homecoming at first seems like a modest enterprise, a document of a few guys' paths to personal catharsis. But the sense of damaged intensity found in all these men's writing -- and found in war lit since the classical age -- builds to a powerful crescendo, and the haunting poem that ends the film, in which the ghosts of American and Iraqi dead confront each other on the banks of the Tigris, is a showstopper.

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70

Variety Ronnie Scheib

Excerpted interviews with WWII and Vietnam veterans suggest that every war is hell, yet it is the specificity of the Iraq War combatants' reminiscences that makes their writing resonate so profoundly.

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63

New York Post Kyle Smith

Like warriors themselves, you will be left to sort through a jumble of emotions: pride and sorrow, bitterness and gratitude.

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50

Los Angeles Times Mark Olsen

A project such as Operation Homecoming should shed light on their experiences, but Robbins' film just falls short.

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What Our Users Said

The average user rating for this movie is 10.0 (out of 10) based on 3 User Votes

Note: User votes are NOT included in the Metascore calculation.

Fifty F. gave it a10:
Extraordinary. The most creative documentary I've seen in years.

Charlie S. gave it a10:
Powerful. Haunting.

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