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Redacted
Magnolia Pictures


4.0

based on 30 reviews
Read critic reviews
How did we calculate this?

based on 46 votes
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FILM:

MPAA RATING: R for strong disturbing violent content including a rape, pervasive language and some sexual references/images

Starring Kel O'Neill, Ty Jones, Daniel Stewart Sherman, Izzy Diaz, Rob Devaney, and Patrick Carroll

A fictional story inspired by true events, Redacted is a unique cinematic experience that will force viewers to radically reconsider the filters through which we see and accept events in our world, as well as the power of the mediated image and how presentation and composition influence our ideas and beliefs. A profound meditation on the way information is packaged, distributed, and received in an era with infinite channels of communication, Redacted uses a variety of created source material--video diaries, produced documentary, surveillance footage, online testimonials, news pieces--to comment on the extreme disconnect between the surface of an image and the reality of ideas and the truth, especially in times of strife. Centered around a small group of American soldiers stationed at a checkpoint in Iraq, Redacted alternates points of view, balancing the experiences of these young men under duress, as well as the perspective of members of the media, with the viewpoint of the local Iraqi people, and illuminates how each have been deeply affected by the current conflict and through their encounters with each other. The charged apotheosis of Brian De Palma's filmmaking career, Redacted caps off a body of work that has explored the politics of image-making and reception more fully than any living filmmaker. (Magnolia)

GENRE(S):	Drama \| War
WRITTEN BY:	Brian De Palma
DIRECTED BY:	Brian De Palma
RELEASE DATE:	DVD: February 19, 2008 Theatrical: November 16, 2007
RUNNING TIME:	90 minutes, Color
ORIGIN:	USA
LANGUAGE(S):	English / French

All critic scores are converted to a 100-point scale. If a critic does not indicate a score, we assign a score based on the general impression given by the text of the review. Learn more...

The Hollywood Reporter Ray Bennett

De Palma's screenplay is outstanding, and he draws wonderfully naturalistic performances from his youthful cast.

Chicago Sun-Times Roger Ebert

The result of the film is shocking, saddening and frustrating.

Christian Science Monitor Peter Rainer

He intercuts documentary sequences from a French news crew and also includes Arab website footage of insurgents and YouTube confessions from soldiers who witnessed a barbarous act, which we also see, involving the platoon and a young Iraqi girl. The concept is audacious but the actors are too theatrical.

TV Guide Ken Fox

The film is by turns strident, obvious, righteously angry and inspired.

New York Post Kyle Smith

De Palma is extreme, visceral, usually in bad taste but almost always riveting. De Palma's Redacted, a no-budget fake documentary that imagines the circumstances behind a real rape and murder of a civilian girl committed by US troops in Iraq, is a piece of anti-war propaganda whose aims I don't agree with, but it jolted me nonetheless.

The Globe and Mail (Toronto) Rick Groen

Love it, hate it, but be sure to watch it, because this odd and disturbing picture is as different as the war it reflects, and that difference is vast enough to seem profound.

San Francisco Chronicle Mick LaSalle

It isn't elegiac, but enraged. It doesn't look back with sorrow, but forward in dread. And it's made with a clear intention - to stop the Iraq war.

Baltimore Sun Michael Sragow

Redacted is a bristling act of protest that obliterates a target it isn't aiming for.

The New Yorker David Denby

Redacted is hell to sit through, but I think De Palma is bravely trying to imagine his way inside an atrocity, and that he?s onto something powerful with his multisided approach.

Time Richard Corliss

Redacted pretty successfully sustains a dual level of hysteria (in its content) and disinterest (in its film-long framing devices). It's an amazingly vigorous work for a filmmaker who turns 67 on Sept. 11... The movie is a cry of national shame; for De Palma, it's a new badge of honor for a wily old vet.

New York Magazine David Edelstein

Anyone who sees the suffering faces of the victims in "Casualties" and "Redacted" knows that De Palma not only despairs over what he?s showing us but implicates his own medium--his own male gaze--in the crimes against nature.

Portland Oregonian Shawn Levy

As a manipulator of images and emotions, De Palma has few equals, and this is his most gripping film in at least a decade. Viewed simply as cinema and not as political rhetoric, it's often a kick in the guts -- even when it makes you roll your eyes.

Austin Chronicle Marjorie Baumgarten

Despite its shortcomings, Redacted is nevertheless a film brimming with spontaneity and fury, and in a season of often-ambiguous films about the war in Iraq, there is a lot to be said for this kind of combustible energy.

Seattle Post-Intelligencer Sean Axmaker

Under De Palma's cool disconnection is an anger, and it's this anger that drives his act of political theater.

Chicago Tribune Tasha Robinson

Like so many of his movies, Redacted is difficult to watch but queasily fascinating.

New York Daily News Elizabeth Weitzman

Like "Lions for Lambs," Redacted is more significant in its sense of purpose than its uneven execution.

Salon.com Andrew O'Hehir

Brian De Palma's Redacted doesn't quite work as a movie. But it works as SOMETHING.

Village Voice J. Hoberman

The most authentic thing about Redacted is the rage with which it was made.

The Onion (A.V. Club) Noel Murray

As an expression of from-the-gut anti-war rage, Redacted is admirable, but as art, it's undercooked.

Variety Derek Elley

Deeply felt but dramatically unconvincing "fictional documentary" -- inspired by the March 2006 rape and killings by U.S. troops in Mahmoudiya, south of Baghdad -- has almost nothing new to say about the Iraq situation and can't make up its mind about how to package its anger in an alternative cinematic form.

Philadelphia Inquirer Steven Rea

DePalma's movie offers its own doctoring and processing, without delivering an ounce of real humanity - good or bad - in the bargain.

Chicago Reader Jonathan Rosenbaum

It shows rare courage in protesting the widespread abuse of innocent Iraqis, but its pseudodocumentary form is full of awkward misfires (such as a protracted use of theme music from Barry Lyndon) and its acting is often terrible.

Premiere Glenn Kenny

The problem here, which vitiates the picture's ingenuity and causes it, finally, to sink like a stone, is in the physical execution of the material.

Empire Ian Freer

De Palma is incapable of making a dull movie, but poor performances and a see-sawing tone make this an unsatisfying experience.

Newsweek David Ansen

if you're trying to make us believe we're watching "reality" by using a faux documentary style, you need actors who never look like they are acting, and this is where Redacted stumbles.

The New York Times A.O. Scott

Its formal novelty aside, Redacted rarely hits the audience with a genuine shock or a clarifying insight. It churns through a set of ideas and emotions that are confusing and unpleasant, to be sure, but also, by now, dispiritingly familiar.

Entertainment Weekly Owen Gleiberman

For all of De Palma's studious multimedia trickery -- a valid, even inspired idea -- Redacted is so naive it's an embarrassment.

Washington Post Desson Thomson

The film's moral commentary is De Palma redux: same old Brian enjoying the peeping, bringing us into the guilt zone, then saying shame on all of us.

Los Angeles Times Kenneth Turan

By any rational standard, this film is kind of a mess. Even if you agree with its politics, you will probably weep at the ineptitude of it all.

Wall Street Journal Joe Morgenstern

The Americans are portrayed with varying degrees of loathsomeness, but there's not much variety in the film. It's all an awful aberration.

The average user rating for this movie is 4.0 (out of 10) based on 46 User Votes
Note: User votes are NOT included in the Metascore calculation.

Sean F gave it a6:
Not as good or as bad as most say. An interesting/controversial look at what U.S. troops are accomplishing in Iraq. I don't see why some have branded this movie unpatriotic. If we don't think about things like this, how can we learn from the mistakes of history, and improve our actions in the world in the future?

Chad S. gave it an8:
An internet slam poetess self-aggrandizingly vociferates about Hollywood's uneven depiction of American and Third World lives, in which a film like "Casualties of War" would be an exception to the rule, because it forces an audience to face the dissonant music of war; that the soldiers, "our boys", we see in the military recruitment videos nothing but mere end-products of wishful thinking. Like the underrated 1989 film starring Michael J. Fox & Sean Penn, American soldiers rape and kill a girl in "Redacted", a no-holds barred film that indicts everybody from filmmakers(even himself, he who directed "Casualties of War") to journalists, as profiteers of other people's misery and suffering. The faux-documentary, the film within the film, shows us how the media, not only soldiers, occupy a military state and act as collaborators of death. Salazar(Izzy Diaz) shoots his "war diary" to get into film school; the French documentarians shoot their film(judging by their flagrant use of artistry; the ants taking down the scorpion) to gain entrance into film festivals and win awards. When a young Iraqi girl's body is delved into by an American soldier's hands at checkpoint, the man behind the camera should turn it off, walk into that private holding room, and separate that marine from the nubile. It's more important to the filmmaker that he catch an American soldier behaving badly than being a decent human being. "Redacted" deconstructs the documentary film. To quote director Francis Ford Coppola when asked by a reporter about "Apocalypse Now" at the 1979 Cannes Film Festival, "This is Vietnam..."

Martin F. gave it a10:
The Americans hate the fact that the world hates them. Their propaganda machine is powerless against one thing: truth. Only simple truth distinguishes ugly from the pure. Likewise, users and critics didn't hesitate to show their ugliness and beauty with their ratings here, as if they can bend the truth in any way.

j gave it a6:
Powerful film, generally it is believably done, but there are a couple of scenes that don't ring true. A compelling piece of filmmaking, gritty and realistically filmed. The acting is fair. I have to give credit to director Brian de Palma for at least trying something different.

Islam A. gave it a10:
At last someone that is not brain washed, describes the pain and agony that every Iraqi lives due to American invasion, lots of voices say that this is only a very small percentage of soldiers actions, but let us assume that she was a French girl that was rapped under Nazi invasion, would not this movie be a master piece in this case, every one that hate this movie, hate it because the power unbiased message that it deliver.

Peter P gave it a10:
This movie is great, stop complaining

Peter F. gave it a10:
An important contribution to recognizing the hidden costs of our illegal invasion.

Redacted Magnolia Pictures

Redacted
Magnolia Pictures