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September Tapes (2004)
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Reviews Counted:34
Fresh:7
Rotten:27
Average Rating:3.8/10
Runtime: 1 hr 31 mins
Genre: Education/General Interest
Theatrical Release:Sep 24, 2004 Limited
Synopsis: An incredible achievement, SEPTEMBER TAPES chronicles one man's attempt to find notorious terrorist leader Osama bin Laden. Don Larsen is the man responsible for the filming; an intrepid... An incredible achievement, SEPTEMBER TAPES chronicles one man's attempt to find notorious terrorist leader Osama bin Laden. Don Larsen is the man responsible for the filming; an intrepid documentarian, he was joined by a bounty hunter in his exhaustive search of the dangerous Afghan landscape. After a battle raged in the Southern hills, eight tapes were discovered containing Larsen's efforts. Detained by the U.S. government for a lengthy period, it was believed the tapes would never be seen by the public. Until now. The sensational footage sees Larsen confronted by the Taliban, make some thrilling headway into finding the terrorist leader, and attempts to provide salient comment on events the filmmaker experiences. The first film to be made in Afghanistan since the collapse of the Taliban, SEPTEMBER TAPES is guerilla filmmaking at its gutsy best. [More]
Studio: First Look
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Reviews for September Tapes
Finally, there are no truths, higher or lower, in September Tapes...just a lot of din.
Johnston's rough-hewn handheld footage generates a sense of dread as a defining force behind the camera, more concrete than any onscreen images.
It's riddled with stilted voice-overs and eye-rollingly awful dialogue.
It's hard to make a case for an American film that intentionally mixes fact with fiction when the facts concerning 9/11, the Taliban and the fate of Al Qaeda leader Osama Bin Laden are already so elusive.
Afghanistan shouldn't be used as a backdrop for some director's selfish attempt at provocation.
The film itself still feels faked, and its calculated exploitation of some real tragedies may be the most unbelievable thing of all.
The whole notion of exploiting a war and its victims to shoot a commercial feature is reprehensible.
Squanders incredible verisimilitude by undercutting it with credibility-defying storytelling.
Credit September Tapes with raising thorny questions about what forms of cinematic storytelling do justice to truth.
Eventually collapses under the weight of its no-budget arrogance, but it goes some interesting places beforehand.
War porn, an amateurish and incomprehensible mishmash of alleged fact and fiction.
It shares a lot with the Hollywood product: a forced gimmick, a dislikable protagonist, a transparent plot twist and a lot of unconvincing drama.
This disturbing docudrama is a remarkable achievement on many levels.
It yanks us eyes-first into a place that we, in our living rooms, have known only as a cliché.
Alternating between the despicable and the inept and sometimes capturing both in a single moment, September Tapes is a craven attempt to cash in on the 9/11 tragedy.
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