Advanced Search Beta »
Basic Search Fields
Iraq in Fragments
Metascore
84 out of 100

Universal acclaim - based on 26 Critics

Critic score distribution:
  1. Positive: 24 out of 26
  2. Mixed: 2 out of 26
  3. Negative: 0 out of 26
view
per page
  1. TV Guide
    Reviewed by: Ken Fox
    100
    Tragically, the title of James Longley's beautifully shot 90-minute documentary refers to not only the state in which he found the Iraq during the two years he spent there shooting over 300 hours of footage, but the structure the violent factionalism that divides Iraqi Sunnis, Shiites and Kurds imposes on his film.
  2. Film Threat
    Reviewed by: Phil Hall
    100
    Offers the Iraqis a rare chance to share their anger and their lives with the outside world. The resulting production is a raw and powerful film that demands to be seen.
  3. Entertainment Weekly
    Reviewed by: Lisa Schwarzbaum
    100
    The calm poetry of the cinematography offsets the mess of the politics to stunning effect.
  4. Seattle Post-Intelligencer
    Reviewed by: Sean Axmaker
    100
    Oregon-born and Seattle-based director James Longley profiles three lives in his impressionistic portrait of Iraq's Sunni, Shia and Kurd communities.
  5. Los Angeles Times
    Reviewed by: Kenneth Turan
    100
    Langley's impeccably nonjudgmental camera knows exactly what details to record. Drawn from more than 300 hours of footage, the film's all too brief 94 minutes mesmerizes with its insight and, rarer still, its beauty.
  6. Chicago Reader
    Reviewed by: Jonathan Rosenbaum
    100
    Much as Emile de Antonio's neglected "In the Year of the Pig" (1968) may be the only major documentary about Vietnam that actually considers the Vietnamese, this film allows the people of Iraq to speak, and what they say is fascinating throughout.
  7. Portland Oregonian
    Reviewed by: M. E. Russell
    91
    Nominated for an Oscar for best documentary feature, it's deeply humane and even more deeply unsettling, in a way that most documentaries about Iraq, which tend toward the polemic, never manage.
  8. The A.V. Club
    Reviewed by: Noel Murray
    91
    The first third of Iraq In Fragments is so intense--a masterpiece in miniature, really--that audiences may not have much emotion left for the rest.
  9. L.A. Weekly
    Reviewed by: Ella Taylor
    90
    Seattle filmmaker James Longley's poetic essay on the plight of ordinary Sunnis, Shiites and Kurds trapped in a war simultaneously waged over their heads and in their faces stands head and shoulders above an overcrowded field of documentaries about the Iraq war.
  10. Wall Street Journal
    Reviewed by: Joe Morgenstern
    90
    A documentary of stunning immediacy and marvelous images.
    All this critic's reviews
  11. Chicago Tribune
    Reviewed by: Michael Wilmington
    88
    One of the year's finest documentaries, a remarkable example of the conjunction of a burningly topical and newsworthy subject with a brilliant filmmaker.
  12. The Globe and Mail (Toronto)
    Reviewed by: Liam Lacey
    88
    Iraq in Fragments already stands up as a classic war documentary, in its unusual poetic form and by its extraordinary access to the lives of ordinary Iraqis.
  13. Salon.com
    Reviewed by: Andrew O'Hehir
    80
    Alone among the works I've seen and read about Iraq in the last three years, Iraq in Fragments captures the tremendous complexity and variability of the country, offering neither facile hope nor fashionable despair.
  14. The New York Times
    Reviewed by: A.O. Scott
    80
    From 300 hours of material, Mr. Longley has created a collage of images, sounds and characters, an intimate, partial portrait of an unraveling nation -- a portrait that gains power partly by virtue of its incompleteness.
  15. Washington Post
    Reviewed by: Ann Hornaday
    80
    A vivid, poetic evocation of life in post-invasion Iraq that works both as impressionistic collage and candid portraiture.
  16. The New Republic
    Reviewed by: Stanley Kauffmann
    80
    Every moment of Longley's film is interesting, and the more we watch, the more clearly we realize that the film cannot solve anything for us.
  17. Austin Chronicle
    Reviewed by: Marrit Ingman
    78
    Offers more questions than answers. Even the Kurds, who seem the closest thing to a success story, long for a unified Iraq.
  18. Miami Herald
    Reviewed by: Marta Barber
    75
    In addition to the interesting camera work, the documentary's undeniable appeal comes in how close Longley gets to the characters, who are all male.
  19. New York Daily News
    Reviewed by: Elizabeth Weitzman
    75
    Visually arresting and deeply disheartening, James Longley's impressionistic documentary explores the pain of a shattered country by homing in on a few tiny shards.
  20. San Francisco Chronicle
    Reviewed by: G. Allen Johnson
    75
    In this last passage Longley shows a poetic, almost elegiacal artistry. After two years, he might not understand the Iraqi people fully, but they have won his heart and mind.
  21. Boston Globe
    Reviewed by: Ty Burr
    75
    Longley takes us through that country without a map; he's an artful, optimistic empiricist who believes what we see matters infinitely more than what we're told.
  22. New York Magazine (Vulture)
    Reviewed by: David Edelstein
    70
    In the end, the movie is more than the sum of its fragments. The montages are intense, the images ravishing. The movie is tactile. When you finally feel this place, you understand just how little you understand.
  23. Village Voice
    Reviewed by: Melissa Anderson
    70
    Whether or not James Longley's boldly stylized reportage breaches public indifference, its enduring value is assured: When the war is long gone, this deft construction will persist in relevance, if not for what it says about the mess we once made, then as a model of canny cinematic construction.
  24. New York Post
    Reviewed by: Kyle Smith
    63
    All three segments are heavy on blame-America speeches, which may be a fair snapshot of Iraqi opinion, but it's strange how fond Longley seems to be of Saddam Hussein.
  25. Empire
    Reviewed by: Patrick Peters
    60
    Shot over three years, this is one of the more considered and insightful Iraqi documentaries - although some may find its stylistic contrasts a little self-conscious and distracting.
  26. Variety
    Reviewed by: Robert Koehler
    60
    As beautiful as it is unrevealing, James Longley's Iraq in Fragments rests on a debatable but firm premise -- that the embattled country is irrevocably separated by its three dominant groups, Shiites, Sunnis and Kurds -- but brings back nothing journalistically substantial from the war front .
prev next
Page:
  • 1