100
This is an amazing movie, released at a frightening time and made under remarkable circumstances.
We hate to say it, but we can't find anywhere to view this film.
What are people saying?
What are critics saying?
70
The New Yorker by Anthony Lane
British director Michael Winterbottom has made his best and most driven picture to date. [22 September 2003, p. 202]
80
The New York Times by Dana Stevens
If there is heartbreak in this movie, there is also a sense of energy that makes it almost exhilarating.
60
Makes engrossing viewing for much of the way...but stumbles dramatically in its final leg.
80
The movie's staccato pacing, lent emphasis by Dario Marianelli's haunting score, evokes the cycles of tedium and terror that make the journey so unnerving.
80
Dallas Observer by Jean Oppenheimer
The charismatic Jamal has the spirit of a young Antoine Doinel, and Winterbottom shoots him to evoke the memory of Truffaut's young hero.
70
Has a message, which it effectively conveys by succeeding first as an affecting film. Winterbottom's actors give a human face to current events as they proceed along their grim road-movie toward a destination that may not even want them. They may be statistics, too, but their stories stick in the mind.
80
Los Angeles Times by Kenneth Turan
What we are seeing may be a representation of the truth, but it is not real, and this collision of artifice and reality is jarring and disconcerting. This is a hurdle but not an insurmountable one. Even if it is counterfeit in a number of ways, the story In This World tells finally wins us over because it is too disturbing and well told not to.
70
Village Voice by Michael Atkinson
Winterbottom was set on bare-bones realism, and so the scalding lyricism of ferocious terrain and sociopolitical absurdity seen in, say, "Kandahar" or "A Time for Drunken Horses," is never resourced.
80
The film has a riveting central narrative, the performances are compelling and, most of all, we need to hear more immigration stories like this.