...despite a provocative climax, the movie settles into a ponderous collection of soliloquies...

| Jun 28, 2022

A rambling road movie with noble intentions and an excess of speechifying.

| Original Score: 2/4 | Sep 29, 2006

The milieu he chooses -- essentially one long, queerly prosaic car ride to nowhere -- robs the film of much of its dramatic force.

| Original Score: 2.5/5 | Jul 27, 2006

A minor movie on a major subject, a drama with an almost unbearable lightness.

| Original Score: 2.5/4 | Jul 7, 2006

Without fail, Gitai's determination to churn everything into metaphoric mud prevails.

| Original Score: 1.5/4 | Jun 2, 2006

Too slight as a metaphor for the larger catastrophe of the Mideast, too preachy to work as an emotionally compelling drama.

Full Review | Original Score: 2/4 | Jun 2, 2006

Much of the dialogue is didactic and pedantic. And when not didactic and pedantic, it's plodding and dull.

| Original Score: C+ | Jun 2, 2006

The message is made clear within the first 10 minutes, leaving us with about 80 minutes of thematic repetition.

| May 4, 2006

[A] fractious film from thorny filmmaker Amos Gitai.

| Original Score: B- | Apr 12, 2006

Free Zone suffers from too-much-information syndrome, stalling out now and again from its tangled narrative wiring and an overload of emotional freight.

Full Review | Original Score: 2.5/4 | Apr 7, 2006

It's a nice crying jag by Natalie Portman, but there's not much else here to recommend.

Full Review | Original Score: 2/4 | Apr 7, 2006

The film is diluted by the use of flashbacks superimposed over present-time scenes. The result is visual chaos.

Full Review | Original Score: 2/4 | Apr 7, 2006

Amos Gitai's long-winded essay revolves around the interaction of three women, an American, an Israeli and a Palestinian, on a car trip from Israel to Jordan.

Full Review | Original Score: 2.5/5 | Apr 6, 2006

Gita has no real interest in who these women are beyond their symbolic resonance.

Full Review | Original Score: C+ | Apr 6, 2006

Per usual, Gitai largely eschews exposition, but his reticence sits awkwardly beside his penchant for saddling his deliberately stereotyped figures with trite, unwieldy speeches and symbolic-ironic biographical data.

| Apr 4, 2006

Addressing conflict by conflicting itself, Free Zone's effect is almost avant-garde.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Mar 1, 2006

With characters more often than not functioning as mouthpieces, audiences might feel like involuntary passengers trapped in the backseat.

| Original Score: 1.5/5 | May 22, 2005

Visually, Free Zone resembles a home movie in which an overly enthusiastic vacationer records every moment of a mundane trip.

Full Review | May 20, 2005

[The] set-up is given a human face by fine performances and a physical journey that's often more interesting than the characters' emotional ones.

| May 19, 2005