80
Virtually an experimental film -- the humanity is rich, but pure image and sensation are what makes it tick.
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80
The New York Times by A.O. Scott
A startlingly beautiful documentary by Bong-Nam Park that is also devastatingly sad.
38
Slant Magazine by Joseph Jon Lanthier
A maddeningly blunt and syrupy rendering of a piquant socio-economic configuration, Park Bong-Nam's Iron Crows is ultimately third-world documentary filmmaking at its most exploitatively surface-groping.
80
The filmmaking is patient and participatory, getting down in the dirt with the workers (in one case the lens is even soaked by a spray of sludge) and allowing several touchingly distinct personalities to emerge.
70
Village Voice by Nick Pinkerton
Park's view - clearly inscribed in his well-structured, practically chapter-headed ("After Hours," "Payday," "Back at the Village") documentary - is that the hideous working conditions and low wages are due to man-made avarice; the workers, though, tend toward a fatalism based in religious predestination.
75
The movie has no story per se, and there are times when it does seem like Park is hovering, vulture-like, over his subjects' shoulders, waiting for a disaster. But Iron Crows isn't devoid of natural human exuberance, nor is it immune to the awesome spectacle of a dangerous job.
75
Iron Crows isn't the miserablist wallow you might expect. While director Park Bong-Nam observes the hazards of ship-breaking with a thoroughness that borders on fetishization, he also catches the humor and camaraderie of men in the trenches.