Redacted

Brian De Palma dusted off a theme similar to the one he used in Casualties of War, but this time conveyed it in a more urgent, brutal, half-documentary manner without a drop of sentiment, beautiful widescreen compositions or acting stars. The filmmaking may be less sophisticated than that of The Hurt Locker, but it’s also more emotionally powerful and caters less to the audience’s tastes. Redacted is a film Americans don’t want to watch. Kathryn Bigelow showed American soldiers in Iraq as martyrs and got an Oscar. De Palma showed the truth and was ignored. (24.09.2010)

DePalma extracted the best of Oliver Stone, stamped it with the hallmark of home video, and yet remained unusually his own. The viewer is thrown into the vortex of the plot and has to deal with many things based on his or her own opinion. True, in some moments he makes up for it by using schematic filmmaking techniques, but on the other hand, he created a film that, in my case, became a stimulus for longer-term thinking. (20.03.2008)