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100A riveting new documentary about the Arab-run Al Jazeera network, reminds us that news programming can vary so widely from place to place that journalistic myths of "objectivity" and "impartiality" seem more naive than ever.
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100It's strong stuff.
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100One of the year’s most significant films.
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100About the search for common ground, among journalists on all sides of the conflict and, through them, between viewers in America and the Arab world. Only within that common ground, Noujaim believes, can something like a workable, personal truth be found.
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100Here's the sliver of hope: In contrast to everything we've been told, the people who run Al Jazeera turn out to be decent and level headed.
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90In the end, the greatest achievement of Control Room may be to simply remind us, as Americans, that in this age of mega-corporate U.S. news media there are other perspectives on world events besides those of Fox, CNN, MSNBC-ABCBS and whoever else feeds us our information.
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90A surprising, puzzling and in many ways brilliant work.
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89Perception is key and Control Room should be required viewing for anyone within reach of a TV signal.
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88Control Room may not seem all that compelling 10 years down the road. But right now, at this very moment, it is essential, imperative viewing.
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88Control Room ends by acknowledging that independence, accuracy and even truth itself may be illusory.
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83Control Room is even more effective in showing the dilemma of the people who make up Al-Jazeera. In a sense, these are "our" Arabs, in that they're Western-educated, conduct their business in English and seem to believe in the basic American principles.
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80If any film can be considered required viewing as the conflict in Iraq continues to drag on and be reported, surely this among them.
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80Remarkable and timely film.
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80This absorbing, significant, and shamelessly entertaining movie not only goes through the looking glass but, no less significantly, turns the mirror back on us.
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80Think of Control Room as a through-the-looking-glass movie. Like Lewis Carroll's Alice, viewers of this remarkable documentary will be disconcerted by a glimpse of a world where everything is reversed.
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80Whatever your opinions about the war, the conduct of the journalists who covered it and the role of Al Jazeera in that coverage, you are likely to emerge from Control Room touched, exhilarated and a little off-balance, with your certainties scrambled and your assumptions shaken.
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80Compelling docu about the independent Arab news service, Al Jazeera.
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80News management is the main issue. Control Room shows how coverage is tailored to fit the audience, both by al-Jazeera and its Western counterparts.
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80May be most valuable for its depiction of the strength of democratic ideals, even in the most precarious and contradictory of circumstances.
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75The film's buried message is that there is a reservoir of admiration and affection for America, at least among the educated classes in the Arab world, and they do not equate the current administration with America.
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75Control Room isn't a systematic dissection of Al Jazeera's possible biases regarding the U.S. or Israel; it's noted that Arabs almost invariably view the war with Iraq in the context of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict while Americans rarely do.
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75If her (Noujaim's) movie teaches us anything, it's that no reality remains unspun.
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75Engrossing.
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75More illuminating than not.
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75Gripping footage about the controversial Qatar-based Al-Jazeera Satellite Channel, which transmits news to 40 million Arabs. But the movie offers neither lucid analyses of the channel nor probing portraits of its journalists.
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70Scenes of dark humor abound as well, like the episode in which the gathered journalists react in fury when they are not provided with pictures of the infamous deck of playing cards depicting the "50 Most Wanted" Iraqi figures.
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70Memorable, if not fully satisfying, film.
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70It puts us in the shoes of men and women for whom the war is not something distant and intangible but a bloodbath in their own back yard, which makes them the very definition of embedded journalists.
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70Enlightening, if structurally relaxed documentary.
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70There is no narrator; rather, we are invited to eavesdrop on--or to get an earful from--such figures as Hassan Ibrahim, a jovial reporter with Al Jazeera, and Samir Khader, one of the network’s senior producers. [24 May 2004, p. 97]
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70Shot during the March 2003 invasion and the early stages of the American occupation, it tells us more about how the channel decides what to report than we probably know about most American newscasts.
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67Anxiety-provoking documentary.
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60It is easy to point out gaps in Noujaim's account. (What, for instance, about the rebuilding that tries to go forward in Iraq?) But the prime importance of this film, I'd say, is that it is not an eye-opener. Of course this change in reporting, this bilateralism, has occurred so far only in wars where the U.S. was the overwhelming superior in force.
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[Anonymous]1
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ThomasR.0