Average Rating: 8.4/10
Reviews Counted: 136
Fresh: 131 | Rotten: 5
A wholly innovative, original, and vital history lesson, with pioneering animation, Waltz With Bashir delivers its message about the Middle East in a mesmerizing fashion.
Average Rating: 8.4/10
Critic Reviews: 32
Fresh: 31 | Rotten: 1
A wholly innovative, original, and vital history lesson, with pioneering animation, Waltz With Bashir delivers its message about the Middle East in a mesmerizing fashion.
liked it
Average Rating: 4/5
User Ratings: 40,399
Director Ari Folman's animated, quasi-documentary Waltz With Bashir follows the filmmaker's emotional attempt to decipher the horrors that unfolded one night in September of 1982, when Christian militia members massacred more than 3,000 Palestinian refugees in the heart of Beirut as Israeli soldiers surrounded the area. Folman was one of those soldiers, but nearly 20 years after the fact, his memories of that night remain particularly hazy. After hearing an old friend recall a vivid nightmare in
R, 1 hr. 30 min.
Documentary, Animation, Art House & International, Special Interest
May 15, 2008 Wide
Jun 23, 2009
$2.1M
Sony Pictures Classics
All Critics (138) | Top Critics (32) | Fresh (138) | Rotten (5) | DVD (12)
A wholly original and emotionally devastating animated documentary confessional.
Animation may be the ideal medium for replicating dreams, and in this unsettling feature by Ari Folman it also proves well suited to autobiography.
It is powerful because this work of art also provides such a cautionary tale about the psychic burdens young soldiers carry deep inside them decades after they've laid down their weapons.
A brave, personal and truly original piece of filmmaking.
If you expect documentaries to be dry doctoral dissertations with talking heads and archival film footage, prepare to be electrified.
The flatness and stiff, jerky movement of the drawing contribute to the dreamlike, increasing dread-filled atmosphere of the visuals, which burst finally into actual filmed images of devastating impact.
Every scene fizzes and crackles with creative charisma as we are carried on an emotional journey of epic proportions.
Despite the director's refusal to come to terms with Israel's role in the Sabra-Shatila massacre, this is a pacifist film that ranks with "Platoon" and other classics.
Folman's use of animation permits an audience to engage with the events, such as they are recalled, in a way that the simple testimony of those involved could not achieve.
Hay momentos de sobrecogedora belleza plástica y sonora (la música de Max Richter es excelente) y de aterradora significación...
Visually striking, but there is a significant problem in that Folman and his fellow veterans are presented as victims rather than victimizers.
Waltz With Bashir does what many films have done before; that is convinces us that war is hell, but it does so in way that is frightening and engaging in an entirely new way.
Waltz is a challenging film in the best sense of the word. It asks questions about the nature of memory and life during a time of war without providing any pat answers.
An arresting concept, yet the resulting film is skimpy, numbing, and less searching than it believes it is
While 'Waltz with Bashir' captures the specifics of the Lebanon campaign, there's something sadly universal about the tales that Folman and the other soldiers recount.
it feels like a fever dream, but moves forward with the churning internal logic and dogged persistence of a mystery-thriller
Folman uses animation to tell a story that he quite possibly couldn't have told using live-action.
Folman's personal journey to recover/understand his own memories in the context of a great national nightmare is a unique, arresting documentary that will stick with you for a good long while. I was so glad I was able to see it.
Par le biais d'une approche filmique unique et novatrice, Ari Folman dresse un portrait sensible, effrayant et révoltant de la guerre.
Waltz With Bashir is an animated documentary (possibly made out of guilt) that artfully accounts the filmmaker's forgotten, but haunting memory of the 1982 Lebanon War, Sabra and Shatila Massacre. Ugly history presented with irresistible creativity and charm. A strong and powerful work that explores the psychological
September 10, 2011Super Reviewer
Lavish and innovative animation only strengthen what is a bold and hard hitting document of the atrocities of war and the toll conflict takes on the mindset of those thrust into the middle of it. A gorgeous and powerful work of art.
May 7, 2009Super Reviewer
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