Film Threat by Tom Meek

The result is crisp, brutal and utterly inspirational.

Time by Richard Schickel

This could have turned out to be an exercise in easy sentiment, easy to shrug off. But Frank Cottrell Boyce's script is carefully understated, and director Michael Winterbottom has achieved a remarkably seamless blend of fictional and factual footage.

Dallas Observer by Michael Sragow

Winterbottom has never before done such potent work; he's created a fiction film about the siege of Sarajevo that bristles with the raw, unnerving textures of a battlefield documentary.

Entertainment Weekly by Lisa Schwarzbaum

The power comes from Winterbottom's rigorous sense of storytelling, which manages to show and tell terrible tales without telegraphing emotionalism

Washington Post by Stephen Hunter

What is so impressive about Welcome to Sarajevo is its cool restraint: Like the best of journalism, it never stoops to sensationalize or sermonize, but merely observes. It's about the facts rather than something called The Truth. [9Jan1998 Pg. D.01]

Newsweek by Andrea C. Basora

Using an almost seamless combination of documentary and fictional footage, Winterbottom provides a vivid picture of life during wartime -- so vivid in fact that it is often difficult to watch.

ReelViews by James Berardinelli

And, while there's nothing revolutionary or extraordinary about the dramatic narrative, the subtext gives Winterbottom's movie its force.

TV Guide Magazine by Maitland McDonagh

Bleak, darkly humorous and surprisingly unsentimental, Michael Winterbottom's film has the desperate air of a cri de coeur, and unlike many fiction films about war, its use of real-life footage seems in no way inappropriate or exploitative.

Salon by Charles Taylor

Winterbottom's film is openly a polemic. Messy and visceral, with an articulate, pointed anger that's recognizably British, Welcome to Sarajevo hits with an impact that's not diminished by the fact that Sarajevo's uneasy peace has held.

Christian Science Monitor by David Sterritt

In keeping with this background, the movie boldly incorporates actual newsreel footage - with authentic images of human suffering, some of them seen in TV reports on the war - into its conventionally scripted and acted story.

San Francisco Examiner by Barbara Shulgasser

The movie is well made by director Michael Winterbottom ("Jude"), with a minimum of overdramatics.

San Francisco Chronicle by Edward Guthmann

The result is startling and repellent -- a challenge to filmgoers accustomed to fake gunfire, fake wounds and cosmeticized death.

Austin Chronicle by Marc Savlov

Tomei looks far too fresh-scrubbed to be anywhere near a bloody, messy hell like this, but the rest of the cast is grimly realistic, particularly Harrelson, who manages to bring some goofball credibility to what is essentially a very small role.

The New York Times by Janet Maslin

Yet this film, for all its apparent immediacy, winds up less affecting than a more poetic or roundabout approach might be.

The New York Times by Elvis Mitchell

Yet this film, for all its apparent immediacy, winds up less affecting than a more poetic or roundabout approach might be.

Chicago Sun-Times by Roger Ebert

The problem is that Winterbottom has imagined both stories and several others, and tells them in a style designed to feel as if reality has been caught on the fly.

Chicago Reader

It keeps the gag quotient lower than Reds but has a similar effect: more urgent in its desire to make us care about the events it depicts, it nonetheless reduces the war in Bosnia to mere scenery for the hackneyed journey of a world-weary journalist from cynicism to caring activism.