Some movies... can leave us feeling simultaneously elated and wiped out. Overwhelmed, we may experience a helpless anger if we hear people mock them or poke holes in them in order to dismiss them. The new Casualties of War has this kind of purity.

| Sep 11, 2023

Casualties of War is the strongest, the simplest and the most painful of all the Vietnam movies because it isn't about how terrible it is not to understand what's going on around us -- it's about the agony of seeing terrible things too clearly.

| Jan 11, 2020

Michael J. Fox is a revelation as the mouse that roared, whilst the score, the direction, and the rest of the cast turn a risky film into a solid addition to the Nam canon.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Mar 16, 2015

There's a moral charge to the action, but it's also swooningly exciting, coldly scary. Every friend may be an enemy, every innocent a traitor.

| Mar 16, 2015

A powerful metaphor of the national shame that was America's orgy of destruction in Vietnam, Brian De Palma's film deals directly with the harrowing rape and murder of a Vietnamese woman by four GIs.

| Mar 26, 2009

De Palma uses his consummate filmmaking skill to craft a reflection of his own grave sorrow about the Vietnam era.

| Original Score: 4/4 | Sep 6, 2006

Casualties of War is dull.

| Jun 24, 2006

Mr. Penn plays Meserve with terrific elan. There is plausibility in every movement and gesture, and especially in his crafty handsomeness. His Meserve is the sort of man one credits with thoughts when the mind may, in fact, be completely blank.

| May 20, 2003

Consciences guilty over Vietnam War atrocities are passionately at work in this well-put-together drama about an American military unit who torture and gangrape an innocent Vietnamese girl.

| Mar 10, 2003

Another Brian De Palma movie, another bludgeoning. Or stabbing. Or body-drilling. Whatever -- as long as the victim's a woman.

| Jan 1, 2000

| Original Score: 3/4 | Jan 1, 2000

It is a breakthrough work, a signal of an artist's blossoming maturity, and one of the most punishing, morally complex movies about men at war ever made.

| Jan 1, 2000

Full Review | Original Score: 2/4 | Jan 1, 1989