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Redacted

Mixed or average reviews
Based on 30 critic reviews
How did we calculate this?
Based on 51 votes
Read user comments
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Movie Info
Genre(s): Drama | War
Written by: Brian De Palma
Directed by: Brian De Palma
Release Date:
Theatrical: November 16, 2007
DVD: February 19, 2008
Running Time: 90 minutes, Color
Origin: USA
Summary
RATING: R for strong disturbing violent content including a rape, pervasive language and some sexual references/images
Starring Kel O'Neill, Ty Jones, Daniel Stewart Sherman, Izzy Diaz, Rob Devaney, and Patrick Carroll
A fictional story inspired by true events, Redacted is a unique cinematic experience that will force viewers to radically reconsider the filters through which we see and accept events in our world, as well as the power of the mediated image and how presentation and composition influence our ideas and beliefs. A profound meditation on the way information is packaged, distributed, and received in an era with infinite channels of communication, Redacted uses a variety of created source material--video diaries, produced documentary, surveillance footage, online testimonials, news pieces--to comment on the extreme disconnect between the surface of an image and the reality of ideas and the truth, especially in times of strife. Centered around a small group of American soldiers stationed at a checkpoint in Iraq, Redacted alternates points of view, balancing the experiences of these young men under duress, as well as the perspective of members of the media, with the viewpoint of the local Iraqi people, and illuminates how each have been deeply affected by the current conflict and through their encounters with each other. The charged apotheosis of Brian De Palma's filmmaking career, Redacted caps off a body of work that has explored the politics of image-making and reception more fully than any living filmmaker. (Magnolia)
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Also On The Web: Internet Movie Database View The Trailer Official Studio Site
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...
The Hollywood Reporter Ray Bennett
De Palma's screenplay is outstanding, and he draws wonderfully naturalistic performances from his youthful cast.
Read Full Review >Chicago Sun-Times Roger Ebert
The result of the film is shocking, saddening and frustrating.
Read Full Review >Christian Science Monitor Peter Rainer
He intercuts documentary sequences from a French news crew and also includes Arab website footage of insurgents and YouTube confessions from soldiers who witnessed a barbarous act, which we also see, involving the platoon and a young Iraqi girl. The concept is audacious but the actors are too theatrical.
Read Full Review >TV Guide Ken Fox
The film is by turns strident, obvious, righteously angry and inspired.
Read Full Review >New York Post Kyle Smith
De Palma is extreme, visceral, usually in bad taste but almost always riveting. De Palma's Redacted, a no-budget fake documentary that imagines the circumstances behind a real rape and murder of a civilian girl committed by US troops in Iraq, is a piece of anti-war propaganda whose aims I don't agree with, but it jolted me nonetheless.
Read Full Review >The Globe and Mail (Toronto) Rick Groen
Love it, hate it, but be sure to watch it, because this odd and disturbing picture is as different as the war it reflects, and that difference is vast enough to seem profound.
Read Full Review >San Francisco Chronicle Mick LaSalle
It isn't elegiac, but enraged. It doesn't look back with sorrow, but forward in dread. And it's made with a clear intention - to stop the Iraq war.
Read Full Review >Baltimore Sun Michael Sragow
Redacted is a bristling act of protest that obliterates a target it isn't aiming for.
Read Full Review >The New Yorker David Denby
Redacted is hell to sit through, but I think De Palma is bravely trying to imagine his way inside an atrocity, and that he’s onto something powerful with his multisided approach.
Read Full Review >Time Richard Corliss
Redacted pretty successfully sustains a dual level of hysteria (in its content) and disinterest (in its film-long framing devices). It's an amazingly vigorous work for a filmmaker who turns 67 on Sept. 11... The movie is a cry of national shame; for De Palma, it's a new badge of honor for a wily old vet.
Read Full Review >New York Magazine David Edelstein
Anyone who sees the suffering faces of the victims in "Casualties" and "Redacted" knows that De Palma not only despairs over what he’s showing us but implicates his own medium--his own male gaze--in the crimes against nature.
Read Full Review >Portland Oregonian Shawn Levy
As a manipulator of images and emotions, De Palma has few equals, and this is his most gripping film in at least a decade. Viewed simply as cinema and not as political rhetoric, it's often a kick in the guts -- even when it makes you roll your eyes.
Read Full Review >Austin Chronicle Marjorie Baumgarten
Despite its shortcomings, Redacted is nevertheless a film brimming with spontaneity and fury, and in a season of often-ambiguous films about the war in Iraq, there is a lot to be said for this kind of combustible energy.
Read Full Review >Seattle Post-Intelligencer Sean Axmaker
Under De Palma's cool disconnection is an anger, and it's this anger that drives his act of political theater.
Read Full Review >Chicago Tribune Tasha Robinson
Like so many of his movies, Redacted is difficult to watch but queasily fascinating.
Read Full Review >New York Daily News Elizabeth Weitzman
Like "Lions for Lambs," Redacted is more significant in its sense of purpose than its uneven execution.
Read Full Review >Salon.com Andrew O'Hehir
Brian De Palma's Redacted doesn't quite work as a movie. But it works as SOMETHING.
Read Full Review >Village Voice J. Hoberman
The most authentic thing about Redacted is the rage with which it was made.
Read Full Review >The Onion (A.V. Club) Noel Murray
As an expression of from-the-gut anti-war rage, Redacted is admirable, but as art, it's undercooked.
Read Full Review >Variety Derek Elley
Deeply felt but dramatically unconvincing "fictional documentary" -- inspired by the March 2006 rape and killings by U.S. troops in Mahmoudiya, south of Baghdad -- has almost nothing new to say about the Iraq situation and can't make up its mind about how to package its anger in an alternative cinematic form.
Read Full Review >Philadelphia Inquirer Steven Rea
DePalma's movie offers its own doctoring and processing, without delivering an ounce of real humanity - good or bad - in the bargain.
Read Full Review >Chicago Reader Jonathan Rosenbaum
It shows rare courage in protesting the widespread abuse of innocent Iraqis, but its pseudodocumentary form is full of awkward misfires (such as a protracted use of theme music from Barry Lyndon) and its acting is often terrible.
Read Full Review >Premiere Glenn Kenny
The problem here, which vitiates the picture's ingenuity and causes it, finally, to sink like a stone, is in the physical execution of the material.
Read Full Review >Empire Ian Freer
De Palma is incapable of making a dull movie, but poor performances and a see-sawing tone make this an unsatisfying experience.
Read Full Review >Newsweek David Ansen
if you're trying to make us believe we're watching "reality" by using a faux documentary style, you need actors who never look like they are acting, and this is where Redacted stumbles.
Read Full Review >The New York Times A.O. Scott
Its formal novelty aside, Redacted rarely hits the audience with a genuine shock or a clarifying insight. It churns through a set of ideas and emotions that are confusing and unpleasant, to be sure, but also, by now, dispiritingly familiar.
Read Full Review >Entertainment Weekly Owen Gleiberman
For all of De Palma's studious multimedia trickery -- a valid, even inspired idea -- Redacted is so naive it's an embarrassment.
Read Full Review >Washington Post Desson Thomson
The film's moral commentary is De Palma redux: same old Brian enjoying the peeping, bringing us into the guilt zone, then saying shame on all of us.
Read Full Review >Los Angeles Times Kenneth Turan
By any rational standard, this film is kind of a mess. Even if you agree with its politics, you will probably weep at the ineptitude of it all.
Read Full Review >Wall Street Journal Joe Morgenstern
The Americans are portrayed with varying degrees of loathsomeness, but there's not much variety in the film. It's all an awful aberration.
Read Full Review >What Our Users Said
The average user rating for this movie is 4.2 (out of 10) based on 51 User Votes
Note: User votes are NOT included in the Metascore calculation.
R gave it a0:
Isn't modern-day cinema great? Steven Spielberg can make a movie like "Saving Private Ryan" that not only shows the horrific realities of war, but also shows the Americans as the good guys. I've seen "Saving Private Ryan" be called "biased" simply because the real bad guys, the Nazi soldiers, are portrayed as, guess what, the bad guys. But when a movie like "Redacted" is released, the far left nut jobs who hate America simply because its the latest fad hail it as a cinematic masterpiece because it shows the American troops as the good guys. Those three soldiers disgraced themselves and their country and are now rightfully rotting away in prison. However, this de Palma takes the heinous actions of just three individuals and makes them seem like the commonplace activities of the brace men and women overseas. He exploited a tragedy solely so he could push the leftist agenda of antagonizing the soldiers who have fought and died to give him the right to make this movie.
Edwin N gave it a9:
Excellent reconstruction of a disgraceful act,Brian De Palma's Redacted is a shocking,saddening and absorbing portrayal of American soliders in Iraq. Just like in his precedent masterpiece,"The Casualties of War", De Palma films soldiers in a way nobody ever could,in a cinema-verite approach that reminds Peter Watkins 70s flicks like "The War Game" or some of Watakamatsu's more abstract features about the Japanese army. "Redacted" also posesses visual and technical advances, with ambivalent camera movements and masterful editing with dual shots and different types of views(in the narrative sense of way).Influences are heavy, but in a positive way,not in a Quentin Tarantino way:Watkins,Costa-Gavras or even early Godard(This films presents diverse similitudes to Le Petit Soldat).It floats between fiction and reality, between documentary and stylish cinema,and remind us of the atrocities of the Iraqi war with a powerful touch: This is triple the shock, a lot more than lesser documentaries such as "Iraq in Fragments" or "Taxi to the Dark Side".Chapeau,Mr. De Palma, for your work has been as rich on the outside,than on the inside. Style and substance grandeur never felt better.
Dog Soldier gave it a10:
To all the Fascist that gave the film a 0:The check point in your mind has been over run. Nothing,not 7 years of occupation, will win the hearts and minds of this "Axis of Evil", "WMD threat to us", country. Reminds me of Nam 1967/8. And now,long after 11years war,58,000 dead and I can buy quality Vietnamese merchandise at many superstores throughout the US. Its not politics,its economics and I sure hope we get a good OIL deal. I mean we EARNED it, right FASCISTS scum ?
Manny R. gave it a10:
Really should not have been released in theaters. However, it is solid made for TV material. The cast, for the most part, is horrible but they are supposed to be. You will never see these actors again save for one perhaps, the Blix character. Anyhow, it does represent the insanity and truth of the Iraq war well and what sends it over the top are the refugee interviews included with the DVD. For those giving it zeroes based on its 'propaganda', I would suggest that it is you who are completely and utterly brain-washed. One listen to Winter Soldier or Dar Jamaal's site or alternative news should correct that. It isn't a technical marvel but it is thought-provoking and does attempt to convey truth.
Phil P gave it a2:
I'm as liberal and anti-war (this one) as you can get. The movie simply sucks. You guys ought to focus on that. I haven't seen such a poorly acted or scripted piece of crap since Point Break. Horribly done in every way. If somebody wants t make a good movie about this incident, I'm all for it.
rob s gave it a0:
The reason the world hates the U.S. is because of dishonest movies like this one made by the blame America first crowd.
Jade K gave it a10:
It's important that someone portrays what is really happening. A must see for the whole family!
