70
New York Magazine (Vulture) by
The filmmakers have done their job brilliantly: The Road to Guantánamo is yet more lousy PR for the infidels.
What are people saying?
What are critics saying?
60
The New York Times by Dana 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.
50
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.
70
The film has a winning combo of excitement and topicality.
50
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.
70
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.
80
The Hollywood Reporter by Kirk Honeycutt
A tough, compelling, must-see movie.
80
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.
80
The Road to Guantánamo is his (Winterbottom’s) most unsparing statement yet of war's brutalizing effect on both the prisoner and his jailer.
75
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."