The Bang Bang Club 2011

Jeannette Catsoulis, New York Times: A based-on-real-life saga that turns bloody reality into bloodless drama. Read more

David Fear, Time Out: The film couldn't care less about the era's political stalemate, treating civil war as merely a backdrop for guys hot-dogging around hot-spot danger zones. Read more

Ted Fry, Seattle Times: "The Bang Bang Club" divulges little insight into what keeps this dangerous brotherhood banging away around the world. Read more

Scott Tobias, AV Club: Silver means to get across the adrenaline rush of lives lived in dangerous extremes, but winds up trivializing their accomplishments and making them seem like men of hearty appetites, but little intellectual depth. Read more

Michael Phillips, Chicago Tribune: Writer-director Silver, who trained in documentaries, appears flummoxed by the challenges of getting the audience inside the heads of these young men. Read more

Michael Rechtshaffen, Hollywood Reporter: When all is said and done, their Pulitzer-winning photographs prove more potent than this well-intended but frustratingly generic picture. Read more

Gary Goldstein, Los Angeles Times: Captures this brutal time - which led to the country's first free, multiracial elections in 1994 and the end of apartheid - in vivid, often bold, but never overpowering strokes. Read more

Ian Buckwalter, NPR: Director Steven Silver resists the story's natural pull toward ensemble drama, creating maddeningly incomplete sketches and two-dimensional archetypes for everyone but Ryan Phillippe's Greg Marinovich. Read more

Elizabeth Weitzman, New York Daily News: The story has heat, even if the movie is more entranced with its subjects than in what they're trying to achieve. Read more

Kyle Smith, New York Post: Seldom does "The Bang Bang Club" show much interest in the big picture of South Africa. Read more

Rex Reed, New York Observer: Applause is deserved, but if ticket sales are as passive as I predict, it means overlooking a very good movie indeed. Read more

Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times: "The Bang Bang Club" seems curiously oblivious to South Africa as a whole. Read more

Andrew O'Hehir, Salon.com: This is one of those relatively rare movies that gets better and smarter as it goes along... Read more

Liam Lacey, Globe and Mail: A queasy mix of high-toned intentions and commercial compromises. Read more

Gayle MacDonald, Globe and Mail: Ryan Phillippe, Taylor Kitsch and South Africans Neels Van Jaarsveld and Frank Rautenbach play the heroic foursome (two of whom won Pulitzers for their riveting photos) whose images shocked the world awake. Read more

Linda Barnard, Toronto Star: Silver cut his teeth in documentaries and it shows in the skilled on-the-ground style of the camerawork. But visuals are only half the story and the plot doesn't keep up. Read more

Peter Debruge, Variety: Club's entertainment value suffers at the expense of trying to capture the events as they happened. Read more

Michelle Orange, Village Voice: Silver treads around and too heavily on the moral ambiguities involved in documenting atrocities, moving between frantic, poorly explained scenes of African conflict and the equally familiar, benumbing aesthetic of boys making a macho game of war. Read more