The Road to Guantanamo
Roadside Attractions | Release Date: June 23, 2006 CRITIC SCORE DISTRIBUTION
64
METASCORE
Generally favorable reviews based on 28 Critic Reviews
Positive:
17
Mixed:
11
Negative:
0
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Critic Reviews

Critic scorePublicationBy date
100
San Francisco ChronicleRuthe Stein
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. Read full review
88
TV Guide MagazineKen Fox
Questions the efficacy and, above all, the humanity of what even steadfast Bush supporters like Tony Blair have condemned. Read full review
88
The Globe and Mail (Toronto)Stephen Cole
As provocative as it is timely. Read full review
80
Film ThreatPhil Hall
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. Read full review
80
The Hollywood ReporterKirk Honeycutt
A tough, compelling, must-see movie. Read full review
80
TimeRichard Corliss
The Road to Guantánamo is his (Winterbottom’s) most unsparing statement yet of war's brutalizing effect on both the prisoner and his jailer. Read full review
75
The A.V. ClubScott Tobias
They never come up with a sufficient reason for crossing into Afghanistan. Their motives for heading straight into a war zone sound like something out of a stoner comedy: They went in search of "really big naan." Read full review
75
New York Daily NewsJack Mathews
The movie, shot digitally, begins as a not very compelling or particularly convincing road movie, and turns into a riveting prison drama. Read full review
75
Boston GlobeWesley Morris
The film's insistence on the men's innocence is matter of fact. But it's also an urgent corrective to the suspicious eye the movies so often cast on Arabs and Islam. Read full review
75
Chicago TribuneMichael Wilmington
It's a fervent, topical political drama of extraordinary impact and ferocity. Read full review
75
Seattle Post-IntelligencerPaula Nechak
A harrowing, frustrating view of paranoia and ineptitude that may seem a case of being in the wrong place at the wrong time but evolves more into a mystery. Read full review
70
New York Magazine (Vulture)David Edelstein
The filmmakers have done their job brilliantly: The Road to Guantánamo is yet more lousy PR for the infidels. Read full review
70
VarietyDeborah Young
The film has a winning combo of excitement and topicality. Read full review
70
Village VoiceJ. Hoberman
One of the most oppressive accounts of life in a military detention since Jonas Mekas's "documentary" version of The Brig or Peter Watkins's Punishment Park. Read full review
63
USA TodayClaudia Puig
A riveting and disturbing documentary that falls short of greatness by not providing enough insight into the characters. It is mostly intent on inciting a sense of outrage in the viewer, and it succeeds. Read full review
63
New York PostLou Lumenick
The Road to Guantanamo is a missed opportunity. This is a subject that deserves a more thoughtful documentary or docudrama, not a hastily thrown together amalgam of the two. Read full review
63
Philadelphia InquirerCarrie Rickey
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. Read full review
60
The New York TimesDana Stevens
While far from a great movie, nonetheless effectively dramatizes a position that has been argued, by principled commentators on the left and the right, for several years now: that the abuse of prisoners, innocent or not, is not only repugnant in its own right. Read full review
60
Los Angeles TimesCarina Chocano
There are some blunders on The Road to Guantanamo. The movie front-loads its first-person accounts with a short list of facts to keep in mind as we watch, creating an imbalance that serves only to undercut the movie's overall credibility. Read full review
60
Wall Street JournalJoe Morgenstern
Watching this mélange of journalism and dramatic license can be enthralling and maddening at the same time, because the ring of truth, which the film has, is not the same as the truth, which remains unknown.
60
SlateDana Stevens
Exhausting, depressing, slightly nauseating, and unfortunately necessary. Read full review
60
SalonAndrew O'Hehir
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. Read full review
60
NewsweekDavid Ansen
Nightmarish scenes are intercut with interviews with the real men. These could be more probing, and the film's urgency can tilt toward shrillness, but nobody else has made the disaster of Guantánamo so painfully vivid. Read full review
58
Entertainment WeeklyOwen Gleiberman
Here's one case where it's no praise to say that a movie leaves you with more questions than answers. Read full review
50
The New YorkerDavid Denby
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. Read full review
50
L.A. WeeklyElla Taylor
By inviting us to take on trust the Tipton Three's accounts of what they were doing in Afghanistan, Guantánamo falls into a familiar trap of agitprop filmmaking - turning the victim into a hero. The movie gives us no particular reason to believe that they were up to anything nefarious - or that they weren't. Read full review
50
Washington PostStephen Hunter
The key question the film raises: Is what happened to the Tipton Three an outrage? It allows us to draw our own conclusions strictly on an eye-of-the-beholder basis. Read full review
50
Chicago ReaderJonathan Rosenbaum
The film is compelling to the extent that the subject is, but also unimaginative and unsurprising. Read full review
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