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70Gitai's experimental technique in Free Zone is dizzying, sometimes thrilling.
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67Natalie Portman demonstrates tour de force weeping in the back of a taxi as an American searching for her roots in Israel.
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63Unfortunately, the characters feel more like symbols than people, despite strong performances, including what might be Portman's finest work to date.
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63A minor movie on a major subject, a drama with an almost unbearable lightness.
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63For all its intelligence, Free Zone has disappointingly little to say.
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60Amos Gitai's most satisfying pic since war drama "Kippur." Schematic set-up is given a human face by fine performances and a physical journey that's often more interesting than the characters' emotional ones, which are weakened by the Israeli auteur's tendency toward convenient doctrinaire-ism and chunks of expository dialogue.
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58Free Zone is similar to the car-based films of Iranian filmmaker Abbas Kiarostami but with a more improvised, less-finished feel.
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58Like a lot of Gitaï's films, Free Zone is part history, part allegory, and part art. Both the history and art hold their fascinations.
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50The movie works best as a car's-eye travelogue of Jordan. And the three women might be good company on another, less stressful trip. Say to the Caribbean.
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50The three women deliver solid performances, but the film is diluted by the use of flashbacks superimposed over present-time scenes. The result is visual chaos.
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50Oddly, in representing a private conflict as the microcosm of an unsolvable catastrophe, Free Zone only manages to miniaturize both.
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50Unfortunately, the message is made clear within the first 10 minutes, leaving us with about 80 minutes of thematic repetition.
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40If the strong performances of its three stars infuse this metaphorically clotted movie with some life, the screenplay (some of which was improvised) has a weak narrative pulse. This political essay posing as a movie makes the mistake of confusing longwinded storytelling with compelling drama.
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40Despite a provocative climax, the movie settles into a ponderous collection of soliloquies.
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A road picture mired by unsteady camera work, lackadaisical pacing and cumbersome speechmaking, Free Zone is an excruciating cinematic trek. Israeli director Amos Gitai's narrative, both visually and conversationally, is a disappointing dud.