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100Superb performances from a nonprofessional cast. It's gripping, timely, and revealing.
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100A heartbreaking, powerful drama.
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100The movie is a rare uncensored postcard from a ruined place, a document at once depressing and hideously beautiful that sketches the real hardships of trampled people -- specifically women -- with authority and compelling simplicity.
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100The movie is an outright miracle. [8 March 2004, p. 92]
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100We are certainly entitled to marvel at its very existence, but that isn't enough. The work itself is extraordinary.
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91Gorgeous and saddening, Osama makes the human-scale claim for the overthrow of governments ruled by the iron hand of religious fundamentalism far more persuasively than any of the rhetoric coming out of the White House or No. 10 Downing St.
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90Osama's unvarnished vulnerability, along with the director's combination of tough-mindedness and lyricism, prevents the movie from becoming at all sentimental; instead, it is beautiful, thoughtful and almost unbearably sad.
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90Although it's a drama, Osama feels like urgent documentary.
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89Osama begins in fear and ends in terror. In between there's all manner of hopelessness, deprivation, and death, which is to say that as the first film to come out of a post-Taliban Afghanistan, it's practically a documentary.
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88Brave dissenting Islamic filmmakers are risking their lives to tell the story of the persecution of women, and it is a story worth knowing, and mourning.
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88It's a feminist nightmare, the world brought to life -- in hard-hitting documentary style.
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88A smooth mix of humanism and keen filmmaking instincts.
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88Osama works simply as the story of one unlucky young girl.