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100Illuminating, disturbing, evenhanded.
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100At the very least, it's more honest and involved in its portraiture of American soldiers in Iraq than anything TV news of any political persuasion has given us.
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90A nerve-jangling work of visual poetry and ironic juxtaposition, and a powerful human story of a group of brave young Americans.
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90Rousing, provocative film.
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88A riveting and indispensable record of the war in Iraq because it comes from the men who lived it.
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88A ground-level documentary, messy and immediate, about the daily life of a combat soldier in Iraq. It is not pro-war or anti-war.
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83The ironies and contradictions that give the first half a dark humor give way to gravity and respect as soldiers are killed (off camera).
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80Sensational viewing.
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80A striking new documentary that shows the war in a way it's not been seen before: from the ground up.
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80The resulting film is an unruly, riveting assemblage of anecdotes and impressions. The larger political and military questions about the war in Iraq are kept deliberately in the background, which some viewers may find frustrating.
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80The film is more of an anthropological essay on the way young Americans relate while they make war, not love, and try to survive in the meantime.
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75In a simple, direct manner, Gunner Palace reminds you that the thousands of faceless, nameless troops in Iraq are still there after you switch off CNN.
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75Despite the jumpy, ride-along camera work and the ever-present threat of engagement, a certain tedium sets in during the film.
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75The best glimpse yet of what it's like to be in Iraq.
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75Gets behind the armor and the camouflage to give viewers a clear if brief view of the men and women who fight and die under the American flag every day in Iraq.
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70A lack of artful filmmaking doesn't detract from the dramatic impact of this fly-on-the-wall, cinema verite documentary.
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70For the soldiers, it's about living to see the next day and living with the things they see, and Gunner Palace honors their perspective like no other Iraq documentary has to date.
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70Floating on the surface of confusion, Gunner Palace has a raw home video quality that's often quite beautiful. Much of the movie is hardly more than an immersion in sights and sounds. Vivid as it is, Gunner Palace is dominated by what isn't shown. It's the human face of Abu Ghraib.
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70Why don't we see this kind of thing on the news every night? Undoubtedly military censorship comes into play, but probably more so it's the prevailing notion that talking-head shoutfests stacked with pundits bring in the ratings, while actual field reporting costs more money.
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70Defies any expectations you bring to it. There are sights in Michael Tucker and Petra Epperlein's eye-opening documentary that will confirm and confound both right and left.
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70Put together by Tucker and his co-director/editor wife Petra Epperlein without a hint of artifice, docu offers up its sounds and images bluntly, and they are very much sounds and images worth having as part of the record.
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70Do these soldiers make it? We keep watching and waiting. There's not much more to Gunner Palace than that, but it's no different than the soldiers' lot.
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67With so many soldiers interviewed, some only fleetingly, it's impossible to keep track of them all.
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67The film's fragmentary structure, though, is suspect. It says that the soldiers find no real meaning in their combat actions, yet Gunner Palace presents the operations we're seeing in so little context, reducing them to a random hash of ''sensational'' moments, that Tucker at times appears to be exploiting the war to create a didactic canvas of manic military unease.
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63Provides an intimate, nonpoliticized, uncensored and totally unappealing look at the lives of U.S. soldiers serving during a grim and uncertain period of insurgency.
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63Works purely as a series of complex snapshots of the conflict in Iraq.
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50Tucker has done a bang-up job, distancing and hypnotizing us with his frenzied, fragmented, sexy images. But war isn't a video game.
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At its best, the film just sits back and lets the weird times roll.
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50Sorry, but this level of insight is readily available from daily news reports.
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50Although the acclaimed documentary Gunner Palace contains some electrifying vignettes of the Iraq war, its jaggedly elliptical and hopped-up style lands it in a limbo between ragged and slick.
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50But good intentions aside, Tucker and codirector Petra Epperlein only further confuse the issue: Their rap-video stylings and use of non-source music create the impression that you're watching characters trapped in a Tom Clancy Xbox game.
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50The picture is too long. It repeats and repeats. Thirty minutes, instead of its eighty-six, could have told us all we need to know about the danger and tedium of these lives.
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30Gunner Palace too often makes the grunts look like mean slackers -- precisely the opposite, one presumes, of what was intended.