Burma VJ: Reporter i et Lukket Land (Burma VJ: Reporting from a Closed Country) Reviews

No matter how many times anyone tries to appropriate shaky camera techniques, they'll never recreate anything as real as a reporter fleeing heavily armed police.

Full Review | Original Score: 4.5/5

Mesmerizing, Oscar-nominated inside look into the 2007 uprising via the cameras of 30 or so underground videographers who risked torture and prison to record the chaotic events surrounding the rebellion of Buddhist monks against the repressive military

Full Review | Original Score: 88/100

...pummeling, electrifying

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5

It's powerful, to be sure, but the most interesting scene is one in which two reporters discuss the impact of their work; are they really changing anything?

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Events are movingly and fortuitously recorded here, but the world's attention has shifted to other media moments.

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If it is rather more interesting as a social and political document than a cinematic one, well, politics and society can be important, too.

Full Review | Original Score: 9/10

Burma VJ celebrates the courage of the Democratic Voice of Burma (DVB), a group of underground journalists who risked their lives to document the 2007 uprising against the junta.

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The word 'brave' is thrown around too liberally in Hollywood. The folks behind Burma VJ are the bravest souls you'll see on screen this year.

Full Review | Original Score: 3.5/4

the footage, with the picture jumping as frenetically as the protesters being filmed, brings home as nothing else quite can the energy and the danger of the events depicted

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5

Burma VJ would be even more intense without its early announcement that some scenes have been restaged, putting the viewer in a regrettably uncertain relationship to what follows.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/4

Narrated by a frightened journalist who trembles as he accumulates forbidden footage and provides a historical viewpoint, "Burma VJ" uses shocking video images and reconstructed scenes to create a coherent, mostly chronological account of what happened.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/4

In traditional terms, this is hardly a film at all. It's more like a bootlegged YouTube video.

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Although directed by Denmark's Anders Ostergaard, the true heroes of Burma VJ are the cadres of guerrilla video journalists who secretly filmed the junta's brutal suppression of the popular revolt in the fall of 2007.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/4

Ostergaard could have just thrown this together like coleslaw and Burma VJ still would be an important documentary.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5

Watching these brave amateurs is pretty compelling, which is a good thing.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/4

An awe-inspiring documentary by Denmark's Anders Ostergaard that tracks how the news escaped in 2007 during Burma's civil uprising.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/4

Thanks to the new guerrilla narrative, the world has a constant flow of images to file in its collective consciousness. And that camera-testable accountability slowly becomes a global civic right that fulfills the noblest purpose of journalism.

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Watch this and you will long remember Burma - and briefly join a revolution.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5

Demonstrates what can be done through the ingenious use of small cameras and mobile phones by brave, resourceful opponents of repressive regimes, and it deserves to be shown widely.

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Burma VJ (Video Journal) is as gripping as any Hollywood thriller - and as heartbreaking as any weepie as we watch the celebratory mood that briefly blossomed in Rangoon give way to appalling violence.

Full Review | Original Score: 5/5