Notwithstanding good performances, potent imagery and cinematic flair, Camp X-Ray does not cut deep nor surprise. The film stretches some boundaries but breaks none.

| Original Score: 3/5 | May 25, 2019

The final 15 minutes betray the first 100, hammering all themes into our skulls. It's an unnecessarily on-the-nose finish to a mostly organic central relationship.

| Original Score: B- | Jun 21, 2016

The baggage Stewart brings to 'Camp X-Ray' makes its first hour more compelling than anything in the screenplay.

| Jun 18, 2016

This is an excellent movie. It is a powerful drama set at the Guantanamo Bay prison. It avoids political posturing and gets down the human interaction between guards and prisoners, while avoiding the usual prison clichés.

| Original Score: A | Feb 26, 2016

Superbly unsettling. Pointedly highlights how incarceration dehumanizes inmate and guard alike. Kristen Stewart's steeliness is perfectly suited to its ironies.

| Jan 19, 2016

Writer-director Sattler keeps the drama small and intimate, between two people, focusing on the minutiae of daily life inside the prison and letting us draw the moral implications.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Jun 25, 2015

The final reel of Camp X-Ray is actually kinda terrible, but that's not enough to undo all the excellence that has come before. At least not for me.

| Jun 10, 2015

A lean and mean essay on human bondage, a minimalist examination of living life to the least.

| Original Score: 8/10 | Nov 14, 2014

Avgenerally minor movie, but not a bad one.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Nov 9, 2014

Camp X-Ray raises quite a few fascinating questions about power, sexism, and war, yet fails to explore them in any real depth. More troubling still, it's a character study that does little in the way of character development.

| Original Score: 2.5/4 | Nov 7, 2014

It's invigorated, somewhat, by strong central performances from actors on opposite sides of a locked steel door.

| Original Score: 2.5/4 | Nov 6, 2014

Writer-director Peter Sattler... grounds his story in the cold operational detail of Gitmo, showing how the soldiers there administer the legal limbo of indefinite detention and insulate themselves from the cruelty and injustice of what they're doing.

| Nov 6, 2014

Effectively dramatizes a situation with the possibility to cause frustration for those both inside and outside the cells.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Nov 6, 2014

Payman Moaadi's performance in Camp X-Ray shines with enough humanity to illuminate the whole movie.

| Original Score: 7.3/10 | Oct 30, 2014

On another movie, the high-corn finale might have worked; here, it just feels patently false.

| Original Score: 2.5/5 | Oct 30, 2014

Has a great idea behind it - a young female soldier assigned guard duty at Guantanamo Bay forms a kinship with one of the incarcerated Muslims - but first-time writer-director Peter Sattler doesn't go anywhere interesting with that notion.

| Oct 24, 2014

It helps if you think of "Camp X-Ray" and the prison face-off between Stewart and Maadi as a cautionary conversation unfolding more like a theater production than a movie.

| Oct 23, 2014

Sattler digs into both sides of those cell doors, exploring the combative side of soldiers having to "babysit" detainees while those inside the prison walls are driven mad by their lack of sleep and unfortunate conditions.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Oct 23, 2014

Even as Camp X-Ray builds to its preposterous final scene, Stewart and Moaadi remain fascinating to behold.

| Oct 21, 2014

[The] film succeeds in following a grand tradition of cinema that doesn't necessarily expose the folly of war, yet rather the more specific folly of sending young, still red-in-the-cheek soldiers into a war zone.

| Original Score: B+ | Oct 20, 2014