SummaryPart documentary, part dramatization, this film is the terrifying first-hand account of three British citizens who were held for two years without charges in the American military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. (Roadside Attractions)
SummaryPart documentary, part dramatization, this film is the terrifying first-hand account of three British citizens who were held for two years without charges in the American military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. (Roadside Attractions)
A film that must be seen to understand the sad truths of our times. It's been made with a sensitivity and creativity that's come to exemplify Winterbottom's work.
For telling America to acknowledge how far the country has deviated from its values and how painfully it has failed to make the world safer, this is the most important movie of the year.
Since the film does not include the testimony of U.S. military or neutral human-rights observers, it gives viewers no way to test the subjects' reliability as narrators.
At the risk of retreating into Waffle House aesthetic relativism, I think the unsettling power of Michael Winterbottom and Mat Whitecross' film stems from its contradictions.
Is this a case of spectacularly rotten timing, or is something being kept from us? The account of why the friends cross the border isn’t very persuasive…The young men may be clueless, but the filmmakers’ habit of obfuscating key points makes us wonder whether somebody is lying.