Ghosts of Cite Soleil (2007)

Packs an emotional punch, but that only partly makes up for the lack of a good story

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06/26/08

Besides anti-Aristide diatribes mouthed a little too much on cue by these hooligans, there's also a French female relief worker mostly providing sexual relief to a gabby gangster. Not to mention 'relief worker' often as Third World code word for CIA spy.

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11/22/07

Ghosts of Cite Soleil is a curiously unfocused, rambling film that never really settles on exactly what it wants to say or exactly which stories it wants to tell.

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08/31/07

Leth ... gets us so close to life in Cité Soleil that we practically can hear the bullets and smell the garbage.

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08/31/07

There's an immediacy to Ghosts of the Cite Soleil that's exceedingly rare for a documentary of any stripe.

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08/24/07

Ghosts of Cite Soleil is too brief and limited in scope to provide a complete picture of Haiti's turbulent history, but its images of how so many of its citizens live and die on a daily basis -- is both heartbreaking and unforgettable.

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08/17/07

More horrific than any tale from the crypt Hollywood could conceive.

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08/10/07

Dutch director Leth is so enamored of the ugliness of it all that he doesn't even try to penetrate the noisy bravado that obscures the patches of truth that lie beneath the surface.

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08/09/07

The ultra-violence of this microcosm [gang] society is what Ghosts is all about.

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07/28/07

This flashy looking documentary scored by Haitian singer Wyclef Jean is such a frightening inside look at a poverty stricken society ruled by violence that it is a marvel that it got made.

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07/22/07

Goes beyond front-line journalism to show the men behind the guns.

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07/20/07

Intimate and terrifying, at points almost expressionistic and surreal, this is never less than a nerve-shredding experience. It even includes an (improbable) love story.

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07/20/07

Leth shows us the horrendous nature of the period but fails to provide much necessary political analysis, without which it is even more deeply depressing than it might have been.

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07/20/07

A garbled account of state-aided terror that sheds little light on these dogs of war.

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07/20/07

While Leth’s guerrilla-style documentary is gripping to watch, it isn’t particularly well-structured and constantly loses focus

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07/20/07

With a film this frenzied and passionate, it is difficult to tell just what’s going on for a sizeable chunk of the running time.

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07/20/07

Dark, dreary, depressing documentary

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07/20/07

Captured at hair-raisingly close quarters by the fearless filmmakers, the sense of lawlessness grabs the throat and haunts the mind.

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07/20/07

This is as appalling, and viscerally compelling, a documentary as will be released all year.

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07/20/07

This deeply questionable movie presents itself as a documentary. Actually it is hardly more than an exploitative gangsta rap video about the worst slums of the Haitian capital Port-au-Prince. Leth's movie is politically and morally illiterate.

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07/20/07