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05/12/06
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Gunner Palace (2005)
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Reviews Counted:31
Fresh:26
Rotten:5
Average Rating:7.2/10
Consensus: A shapeless documentary, but shows what's it like for the soldiers on the ground.
Theatrical Release:Mar 4, 2005 Limited
Box Office: $63,520
Synopsis: In this striking documentary shot in 2003, early on in the US-led war on Iraq, a group of American soldiers in Baghdad who have taken over a bombed-out palace that belonged to Uday Hussein, the son... [More]
Director: Mike Tucker
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Reviews for Gunner Palace
Top CriticTucker takes it all in without taking a stand, though his sympathies -- expressed through voiceover narration -- clearly lie with the men and women in the field.
04/15/05
Top CriticYou certainly can't question Tucker's bravery, but you may occasionally feel the urge to ask him to be quiet.
04/07/05
Top CriticWhile Gunner Palace has the immediacy of street rap, it is actually a throwback to the cinema verite style of pioneering documentarians D.A. Pennebaker, Albert Maysles and Frederick Wiseman.
03/25/05
Top CriticThe film's strength -- and its weakness -- is in its you-are-there view of guys who are e-mailing their loved ones back home one minute and breaking down the doors of Iraqi homes the next, on the hunt for the enemy.
03/24/05
Top CriticA bit disjointed but accomplishes its mission: to provide a glimpse into the soldiers' everyday lives without taking a side on the war.
03/17/05
Top CriticA doc that doesn't quite live up to its premise but still manages to go beyond packaged news and into the often surreal days and nights of soldiers in a strange, modern war.
03/12/05
Top CriticJammed with information and serious testimony, giving a detailed and textured account of what it's like to be fighting the war more than a year after victory was declared.
03/11/05
Top CriticWorks purely as a series of complex snapshots of the conflict in Iraq.
03/11/05
Top CriticThis film is so valuable. Not because it argues a position about the war and occupation, but because it simply goes and observes as soldiers work and play, talk and write letters home and, on a daily basis, risk their lives in sudden bursts of violence.
03/11/05
Top CriticWe don't get to know the soldiers as individuals well enough.
03/11/05
Top CriticInvaluable if incomplete.
03/11/05
Top CriticDirector Michael Tucker has accomplished something difficult, making a casual though often intense film in the midst of a war zone.
03/11/05
Top CriticSuggests the primacy of movies in shaping both the reality that led these soldiers to enlist and the one they found in Iraq when they got there.
03/10/05
Top CriticA timely and pertinent, if rough-hewn, effort.
03/10/05
Top CriticI have seen much televised footage of Baghdad from a distance, but I have never before been made aware of how large and built-up a city Baghdad is.
03/10/05
Top CriticTucker has an eye for arresting imagery, but not the maturity or finesse to illuminate it.
03/10/05
Top CriticToo much of the film feels like a slavish imitation of the fictional Apocalypse Now, with Michael Tucker's narration sounding like a parody of Martin Sheen's raspy weariness.
03/07/05
Top CriticFor most of us, Michael Tucker and Petra Epperlein's riveting documentary will be as close as we ever get to seeing the Iraq war as it has unfolded for the men and women on the ground.
03/05/05
Top CriticThe film is more of an anthropological essay on the way young Americans relate while they make war, not love, and try to survive in the meantime.
03/04/05
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