Langley's impeccably nonjudgmental camera knows exactly what details to record. Drawn from more than 300 hours of footage, the film's all too brief 94 minutes mesmerizes with its insight and, rarer still, its beauty.Read Full Review »
100
ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY: Lisa Schwarzbaum
The calm poetry of the cinematography offsets the mess of the politics to stunning effect.Read Full Review »
80
The New York Times: A.O. Scott
From 300 hours of material, Mr. Longley has created a collage of images, sounds and characters, an intimate, partial portrait of an unraveling nation -- a portrait that gains power partly by virtue of its incompleteness.Read Full Review »
80
Salon.com: Andrew O'Hehir
Alone among the works I've seen and read about Iraq in the last three years, Iraq in Fragments captures the tremendous complexity and variability of the country, offering neither facile hope nor fashionable despair.Read Full Review »
80
Washington Post: Ann Hornaday
A vivid, poetic evocation of life in post-invasion Iraq that works both as impressionistic collage and candid portraiture.Read Full Review »
75
Boston Globe: Ty Burr
Longley takes us through that country without a map; he's an artful, optimistic empiricist who believes what we see matters infinitely more than what we're told.Read Full Review »
70
Village Voice: Melissa Anderson
Whether or not James Longley's boldly stylized reportage breaches public indifference, its enduring value is assured: When the war is long gone, this deft construction will persist in relevance, if not for what it says about the mess we once made, then as a model of canny cinematic construction.Read Full Review »
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