| STX Entertainment | Release Date: February 12, 2021 | CRITIC SCORE DISTRIBUTION | ||
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Positive:
13
Mixed:
22
Negative:
0
|
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Critic Reviews
The Observer (UK)Apr 5, 2021
The styling is at odds with the otherwise straightforward courtroom narrative. The prestige procedural elements work better; the real-life story is enraging, and it’s fun to see Benedict Cumberbatch’s morally conflicted military prosecutor lock horns with Foster’s icy human rights lawyer.
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The TelegraphApr 1, 2021
What lifts it to a major degree is Rahim’s performance. We know little of Salahi’s life outside Guantánamo, dealing with him as a virtual blank slate, but he fills this in with a remarkably charismatic personality, riven with contradictions, and clinging to bursts of mischievous humour as a survival strategy.
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Kevin Macdonald’s drama is determined to put a name and a face to the legion of largely anonymous casualties of the War on Terror — not the victims of attacks, but the other ones, i.e. mostly Middle Eastern men who, by some circumstantial evidence, slivers of association or maybe just their nationality, became wards of the state held in a perpetual purgatory.
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Certainly, The Mauritanian doesn’t lack for sincerity or muted rage. But the earnest, pat execution ultimately does a disservice to Mohamedou Ould Slahi’s arduous odyssey. His is a story that needs to be told, but with a little more urgency and ingenuity than what’s brought to bear here.
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It’s revealed that the evidence against Salahi, who admits only to training with the formerly CIA-backed Afghan mujahideen in an al-Qaeda camp back in the early ’90s, consists of summaries of reports and confessions, which neither side is supposed to see. But instead of rising to the challenge of such potentially abstract subject matter, the film opts for clichés: file boxes, lawyer talk over fast food, the classic confrontation in a poorly lit parking lot.
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The Film StageFeb 17, 2021
The film gives seasoned actors like Foster and Cumberbatch just enough room to flex some scene-chomping muscle, while relegating poor Shailene Woodley to the background in nearly every scene as Hollander’s dopey inexperienced associate. Rahim, on the other hand, knows this is his film even when Macdonald doesn’t. As with his star-making turn in A Prophet, there’s something burning inside that always threatens to boil over.
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IndieWireJan 14, 2021
If The Mauritanian is a slight cut above so many of the pious and self-flagellating political thrillers that Hollywood churned out in the years after 9/11, that’s because it doesn’t aim to exorcise America’s guilt so much as it tries to use it as a necessary step on the road towards forgiveness.
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