A ruthlessly disturbing yet important film.

| Original Score: 8/10 | Nov 28, 2020

The delightfully boyish queer helmer Marco Kreuzpainter now does a complete switch in theme and tone to tell the story...

| May 20, 2020

Intense, gritty, substantive, compelling, humanizing. Trade begs for Oscar acknowledgment and yours.

| Nov 9, 2019

Full Review | Original Score: 3/5 | Nov 18, 2011

A brutal, shattering story of child trafficking that is intended to deliver a sobering punch about the global human trafficking trade, Marco Kreutzpaintner's powerful drama is in fact based on investigative reports in the New York Times.

| Jul 29, 2009

Heartfelt and fitfully suspenseful, it's grim, message-led stuff.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/5 | Dec 12, 2008

If only the whole matched the power and potency of the details. Masquerades as a searing exposé, but turns out to be a lurid and overwrought account.

| Original Score: 2/5 | Dec 12, 2008

Such difficult subject matter requires a harder-edged delivery, but hopefully this accessible drama will therefore get its message across to a wider audience.

| Original Score: 3.5/5 | Dec 12, 2008

This cockeyed odd-couple road movie is well-intentioned, but it comes perilously close to feeding off the crimes it condemns.

| Original Score: 2/5 | Dec 12, 2008

Is it possible to agree with what a film is saying while disliking the way it says it? Trade leaves no arm untwisted and no message unrammed.

| Original Score: 2/5 | Dec 12, 2008

Kline and the talented Gaitan do their best to engage on a human level, but ending with various sobering stats about the global sex trade only underlines the film's woefully misplaced dramatic emphasis.

| Original Score: 2/5 | Dec 12, 2008

Jose Rivera's script plays uneasily, as do some of the directorial flourishes: the shots of rose stems and caged birds are galumphingly emphatic at moments that need no underlining.

| Original Score: 2/5 | Dec 12, 2008

With terrific performances and strong direction throughout, this hard-hitting thriller delivers a powerful wake-up call.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Dec 12, 2008

This involving film is weakened by a script that tries to create a formulaic thriller out of an important subject matter.

| Original Score: 2.5/5 | Dec 12, 2008

Trade is a dreadfully hollow film, empty of everything except pretension and self-importance posing as art.

| Original Score: 2/10 | Feb 28, 2008

Just misses making its urgent point, which was surely the purpose of this emotionally stirring, troubling film, by turning up the excessively convoluted melodrama, and turning its eyes away from the sociopolitical issues that sex slavery thrives on.

| Jan 20, 2008

| Original Score: 2/6 | Jan 18, 2008

A documentary about sex trafficking might have been more powerful. Dramatizing the subject in this fashion, with a race-against-time road trip, breathless online bidding and a couple of different happy endings, simply cheapens it.

Full Review | Dec 3, 2007

Yes, a conventional documentary about sex slavery would probably be more illuminating. It would also be more unbearable.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/4 | Oct 26, 2007

Trade has cojones for trying to lay the kind of political guilt trip it does on us with its sham aesthetics and lurid telenovela-writ-large storyline.

| Original Score: 0/4 | Oct 19, 2007