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100It's an uncompromising drama, not easy to watch. And it is one of the year's highlights.
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100Offers a view of war that is anything but epic. Instead of sweeping battles and swooping fighter planes, in Lebanon we are brought into the impossibly claustrophobic world of a lone tank crew.
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100With luck The Hurt Locker's recent awards haul should draw audiences to this equally intense and actually more brilliant depiction of war. It marks the arrival of a sensational new talent behind the camera and is a debut that deserves to be seen.
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100It took writer-director Samuel ''Shmulik'' Maoz nearly 30 years to make this disturbing, visceral, personal film.
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100A terrifying, absorbing 93 minutes spent in hell. It captures the intensity of warfare in a visceral fashion that recalls Stanley Kubrick's "Full Metal Jacket" and Oliver Stone's "Platoon."
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100Not just the year's most impressive first feature but also the strongest new movie of any kind I've seen in 2010.
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100Lebanon is not just the name of an excellent new Israeli film, it signifies a continuing national obsession that shows no signs of going away.
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100Lebanon is meticulous, nearly clinical in its attention to what happens in war -- specifically what happened in the first days of the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982 -- but it is also a palpably and intensely personal film.
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100Never before, not even in the claustrophobic submarine epic "Das Boot," has a physical point of view so completely dictated a philosophical point of view.
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100Samuel Maoz drew from his own war experiences to write and direct this searing drama, which ranks alongside "Platoon" and "No Man's Land" as an antiwar statement and recalls the claustrophobic despair of "Das Boot."
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90The performances are spot on and so is the film's ever growing sense of horror.
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88Harrowing and grueling, Lebanon ends on a gentle, hopeful note.
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While the title alone may send people into a tizzy, this actually isn't a movie about which side is right or wrong.
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88Lebanon gives us viscerally violent, intensely distressing glimpses into war's annihilation of people, places, and communities.
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88Although Lebanon is to be congratulated for its bold visual strategy and strong antiwar stance, the film becomes claustrophobic after a while.
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The emotional traumas of young Israeli soldiers drafted into the war with Lebanon in the 1980s are recounted through the eyes of a tank crew in this wrenching concentration of raw emotion directed by Samuel Maoz.
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80Very little gets in the way of Lebanon's apocalyptic mood; if it turns its audience even slightly away from barbarism, it might have done its job.
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78The scoped camerawork is a shrewd tactic; only occasionally does its flat, proscenium effect make the action feel overly staged.
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75Lebanon is inspired by the director's traumatic days at the front, giving his work a sense of authority.
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75As good as the film is in conveying the feeling of the walls closing in, it has to be said that the script won't win any prizes for subtlety - the director seems to relish ham-fisted ironies.
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75An emotionally powerful if somewhat divided experience. The grimness, the sweat, the panic are there in Saving Private Ryan-level intensity. At the same time, you never entirely lose the sense that the movie is a formal and calculated cinematic exercise, something of an illustrated argument.
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75There's a soap opera going on inside that tin can with a cannon.
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75Lebanon isn't as resonant as the haunting mix of autobiography and animation in "Waltz with Bashir," which dealt with the same war. Still, the film's fresh craft promises more from a director who turns the tiniest possible of settings into a sobering metaphor for the madness of a larger world.
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70The movie ends powerfully, with a sudden pileup of fright, death and a disconcerting glimpse of beauty. If Lebanon's goal is to keep the viewer on edge and off balance, its final minutes are exemplary.
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70Visceral, torn-from-the-memory filmmaking that packs every punch except one to the heart, Lebanon is the boldest and best of the recent mini-wave of Israeli pics ("Beaufort," "Waltz With Bashir") set during conflicts between the two countries.
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60Director Samuel Maoz's gripping you-are-there feel does for tanks what "Das Boot" did for submarines, and that chokehold only gets tighter as this taut drama about the 1982 Israeli-Lebanese war goes on.
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50It's the same fine line that so often separates artfulness and "trying too hard" -- a line that Lebanon tramples all over.
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50The film's visceral assault extends to the sledgehammer script, an amassment of unsubtle ironies and war-is-hell clichés that often reduce it to an amateurish theatrical stunt.
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Lebanon works as a disasters-of-war screed, a depiction of men under impossible stress and, politics aside, a taut, agonizing thriller. You'll want to see this salutary, unrelentingly claustrophobic nightmare.
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User score distribution:
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Positive: 4 out of 7
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Mixed: 0 out of 7
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Negative: 3 out of 7
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