Movie Review for No End in Sight

Summary: An examination of the Bush Administration's conduct of the Iraqi war and occupation. The film chronicles the manner in which the principle errors of U.S. policy--the use of insufficient troop levels, allowing the looting of Baghdad, the purging of professionals from the Iraqi government, and the disbanding of the Iraqi military--largely created the insurgency and chaos that engulf Iraq today. How did a group of men with little or no military experience, knowledge of the Arab world or personal experience in Iraq come to make such flagrantly debilitating decisions? The film marks the first time Americans will be allowed inside the White House, Pentagon, and Baghdad's Green Zone to understand for themselves what has become the disintegration of war-torn Iraq.

                         Reviews of No End in Sight
By Marcy Dermansky of About.com (7/0)
            If you want take the leap from disbelief and confusion to a clearer, empowering understanding of ...

By Philip Martin of Arkansas Democrat-Gazette (7/0)
            ...a movie that will make you angry or sad. It provides no escape or transport from, but rather d...

By Christy Lemire of Associated Press (7/0)
            No End in Sight will leave you floored, agape and enraged anew.

By Marc Savlov of Austin Chronicle (7/0)
            Narrated with a detached, grim authority by Campbell Scott, Ferguson's film is surely the most no...

By Michael Sragow of Baltimore Sun (7/0)
            If any movie can rid Americans of 'Iraq war fatigue,' it's Charles Ferguson's muscular documentar...

By Wesley Morris of Boston Globe (7/0)
            ...the film is tough-minded and essential -- a severely galling reality check.

                         Reviews of No End in Sight
By Wesley Morris of Boston Globe (7/0)
            A raft of documentaries have come along since the start of the war, some of them accusatory, some...

By Sean O'Connell of Charlotte Weekly (7/0)
            Bleak, dry and marginally repetitive, "Sight" fails to answer with clarity why bad decisions were...

By Roger Ebert of Chicago Sun-Times (7/0)
            This is not a documentary filled with anti-war activists or sitting ducks for Michael Moore.

By Roger Ebert of Chicago Sun-Times (7/0)
            Remember the scene in A Clockwork Orange where Alex has his eyes clamped open and is forced to wa...

By Michael Phillips of Chicago Tribune (7/0)
            This devastating critique of the Iraq war can't, and won't, be easily picked apart by those who d...

By Peter Rainer of Christian Science Monitor (7/0)
            Although this is Ferguson's first feature -- he paid for it himself -- it's a masterfully assured...

                         Reviews of No End in Sight
By Kim Voynar of Cinematical (7/0)
            The film is methodically edited, interspersing tales from the ground with policy wonks, decisions...

By Cole Smithey of ColeSmithey.com (7/0)
            Organized, concise and plain as day, "No End In Sight" is necessary viewing for audiences the wor...

By Edward Douglas of ComingSoon.net (7/0)
            Ferguson's debut doc is a brilliant piece of investigative journalism.

By Harvey S. Karten of Compuserve (7/0)
            Yet another doc that socks it to the current administration's foreign policy--this one most effec...

By Matt Brunson of Creative Loafing (7/0)
            Absorbing documentary that dissects the mind-numbing incompetence that has defined this White Hou...

By Lisa Kennedy of Denver Post (7/0)
            No End in Sight makes one thing clear: Were it not so bloody, the war in Iraq would be destined t...

                         Reviews of No End in Sight
By Brian Orndorf of eFilmCritic.com (7/0)
            Want to kick start a drinking problem? Just give No End in Sight a look, and you're assured a col...

By Emanuel Levy of EmanuelLevy.Com (7/0)
            A damning critique conducted with surgical precision, Ferguson's Sundance Festival prize-winning ...

By Owen Gleiberman of Entertainment Weekly (7/0)
            Leaves you furious at an administration of armchair warriors, yet it offers the catharsis of cold...

By Eric D. Snider of EricDSnider.com (7/0)
            It comes across as something of a horror story: This happened, it was a fiasco -- and now there m...

By Daniel Eagan of Film Journal International (7/0)
            Should be required viewing for anyone who thinks the Iraq war is progressing according to plan.

By Rick Kisonak of Film Threat (7/0)
            The most important film of the year thus far and, more significantly, the most comprehensive, cle...

                         Reviews of No End in Sight
By Chris Barsanti of filmcritic.com (7/0)
            will have you alternately slapping your forehead in stunned disbelief and shaking your head in di...

By Kent Turner of Film-Forward.com (7/0)
            The larger picture presented here will likely be old news, although it will jab the memory and st...

By Rob Vaux of Flipside Movie Emporium (7/0)
            Its message should be dispassionately studied by anyone who presumes to care about the future of ...

By Michael Rechtshaffen of Hollywood Reporter (7/0)
            A damning appraisal of America's handling of the Iraq war.

By Liz Braun of Jam! Movies (7/0)
            You really should see this movie, even though it will make you sick.

By David Kaplan of Kaplan vs. Kaplan (7/0)
            As one of the interviewees put it succinctly, there is no light at the end of the tunnel.

                         Reviews of No End in Sight
By Jeanne Kaplan of Kaplan vs. Kaplan (7/0)
            We all need to learn a few lessons from this and ratchet up our outrage.

By Tim Grierson of L.A. Weekly (7/0)
            ...his [Ferguson's] brilliant and riveting documentary about the Bush administration’s failures i...

By Jeffrey Overstreet of Looking Closer (7/0)
            Ferguson consults not the administration's political opponents, but the very experts that the U.S...

By Andy Klein of Los Angeles CityBeat (7/0)
            [W]e need ... a multi-volume/reel history [of] the unprecedented stupidity and mendacity of the B...

By Dennis Lim of Los Angeles Times (7/0)
            No End in Sight, the latest Iraq documentary, is the first to attempt a detailed historical overv...

By Duane Dudek of Milwaukee Journal Sentinel (7/0)
            Charles Ferguson holds this fact to be self-evident: that the chaos in Iraq is the direct result ...

                         Reviews of No End in Sight
By Colin Covert of Minneapolis Star Tribune (7/0)
            Even dedicated news junkies will gain new understanding of a campaign with no end in sight.

By Jack Mathews of New York Daily News (7/0)
            The most compelling and least partisan of all the Iraq documentaries.

By David Edelstein of New York Magazine (7/0)
            Soberly narrated by Campbell Scott, the film is a meticulous, thoroughly engrossing lesson in how...

By Kyle Smith of New York Post (7/0)
            The movie is at times incoherent...

By Eric Kohn of New York Press (7/0)
            Ferguson’s inquiry into the war doesn’t spend much time on the ground, but it features a tense ro...

By A. O. Scott of New York Times (7/0)
            ...exacting, enraging...

                         Reviews of No End in Sight
By Frank Swietek of One Guy's Opinion (7/0)
            Doesn't offer startlingly new information, [but] its calm, methodical presentation of the evidenc...

By Noel Murray of Onion AV Club (7/0)
            So No End In Sight is hardly another partisan anti-war doc. Instead, it's a cogent, often infuria...

By Roger Moore of Orlando Sentinel (7/0)
            This is a movie about the very officials who boasted 'I don't do quagmires' (then-defense secreta...

By John Thomason of Orlando Weekly (7/0)
            You’ll leave the picture shaken and stirred, knowing that if the right people were in charge, thi...

By Dennis Schwartz of Ozus' World Movie Reviews (7/0)
            It's a film that only begins to take baby steps in telling what went wrong and how insane it is t...

By Jeanne Aufmuth of Palo Alto Weekly (7/0)
            A blistering, on-point expose of the movers and shakers who paved our way into a senseless confli...

                         Reviews of No End in Sight
By Carrie Rickey of Philadelphia Inquirer (7/0)
            Lucid, concise and devastating.

By Sean Burns of Philadelphia Weekly (7/0)
            ...the saddest, scariest horror movie I've seen in years.

By Cynthia Fuchs of PopMatters (7/0)
            You know the Iraq war is going badly. What you may not know is how it also started badly.

By James Kendrick of Q Network Film Desk (7/0)
            The most riveting film of the summer, and also the saddest.

By Louis Proyect of rec.arts.movies.reviews (7/0)
            A documentary that rues the fact that the US was not able to impose its will on the Iraqi people,...

By Pam Grady of Reel.com (7/0)
            A valuable summary of a variety of missteps that have led to the current debacle.

                         Reviews of No End in Sight
By Michelle Orange of Reeler (7/0)
            This essential documentary is a clear-eyed, coherent dissection of how crucial decisions were mad...

By Laura Clifford of Reeling Reviews (7/0)
            This is the Iraq War documentary that covers all bases...Just listen to the silence of those who ...

By Andrew O'Hehir of Salon.com (7/0)
            A systematic and rigorous history of the Iraq war to date.

By Sean Means of Salt Lake Tribune (7/0)
            The best documentary to be made about the war in Iraq.

By Jean Lowerison of San Diego Metropolitan (7/0)
            This is depressing stuff, brilliantly presented.

By Mick LaSalle of San Francisco Chronicle (7/0)
            ...the most coolheaded of the Iraq war documentaries, the most methodical and the least polemical

                         Reviews of No End in Sight
By Mick LaSalle of San Francisco Chronicle (7/0)
            No End in Sight is the most coolheaded of the Iraq war documentaries, the most methodical and the...

By William Arnold of Seattle Post-Intelligencer (7/0)
            First-time writer-producer director Charles Ferguson is a noted think-tank scholar who is less in...

By Tom Keogh of Seattle Times (7/0)
            Its list of interviewees includes a number of insiders once deeply involved in the bungled afterm...

By Ed Gonzalez of Slant Magazine (7/0)
            Charles Ferguson has designed No End in Sight to sink in.

By David Fear of Time Out (7/0)
            As a CliffsNotes history lesson, Ferguson’s doc is a much needed attempt to uncover what happened...

By Ken Fox of TV Guide's Movie Guide (7/0)
            The anger that fuels Ferguson's film is felt in nearly every frame.

                         Reviews of No End in Sight
By Robert Koehler of Variety (7/0)
            [Director] Ferguson delivers the calm, meticulous survey of U.S. policy that legions of critics o...

By Rob Nelson of Village Voice (7/0)
            Masterfully edited and cumulatively walloping.

By Stephen Hunter of Washington Post (7/0)
            It's a furious, if quietly stated, indictment of the president and all his men in the debacle tha...

By John Beifuss of Commercial Appeal (Memphis, TN) (3/5) Login Required (Login Required)
            The film is not anti-war but anti-arrogance and anti-idiocy.

By Mark Keizer of Boxoffice Magazine (6/1) No reference
            ...Ferguson’s take has the precision and seriousness of purpose of a sniper’s bullet while Moore’...

By J. R. Jones of Chicago Reader (6/1) No reference
            Ferguson is admirably tenacious in assigning blame for the boneheaded mistakes that have doomed I...

                         Reviews of No End in Sight
By Jeff Vice of Deseret News, Salt Lake City (6/1) No reference
            This one is not just a series of personal, one-sided attacks, as Moore's film seemed to be. Inste...

By Terry Lawson of Detroit Free Press (6/1) No reference
            Ferguson's case is so confidently built that it seems unassailable...

By Josh Bell of Las Vegas Weekly (4/3) No reference
            The movie's larger points are sobering and relevant, no matter how many times they've already bee...

By Connie Ogle of Miami Herald (3/4) No reference
            A clear-eyed appraisal and condemnation of Bush administration war policies as seen through the e...

By A. O. Scott of New York Times (6/1) No reference
            No End in Sight offers an emphatic, well-supported answer to a question that has already begun to...

By Jan Stuart of Newsday (6/1) No reference
            ...words speak even louder than visual evidence in Charles Ferguson's lacerating analysis of Amer...

                         Reviews of No End in Sight
By Marc Mohan of Oregonian (6/1) No reference
            The point of [Ferguson's] film seems to be that even though the invasion was unnecessary and wron...

By Jeffrey Chen of Window to the Movies (3/4) No reference
            For anyone who's wondering why we're still stuck in Iraq, give this quick 100-minuter a whirl and...

By Kam Williams of DallasBlack.com (6/1) Not Reachable
            While this incriminating documentary makes a convincing case against the White House, it arrives ...

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