It is a deplorable work, which ... espouses nauseating pro-military and patriotic sentiments.

| Feb 10, 2021

Desert One has no real point of view. It doesn't offer much, beyond honoring the men who tried to rescue the hostages, and is by default but not by conviction militaristic.

| Jan 9, 2021

Kopple's best films capture blistering humanity, and that's mostly absent here.

| Nov 17, 2020

what makes the film really work is the humanity that Kopple draws out of the narrative

| Original Score: 3.5/4 | Oct 16, 2020

Featuring an impressive breadth of interview subjects, there's a sense that the full story - or something very close to it - is being told in as objective a way as possible.

| Original Score: A- | Sep 10, 2020

[T]here are so many stories, seen from such different angles, that we're left wondering what specific story the filmmaker wants to tell.

| Original Score: 2.5/4 | Sep 4, 2020

You can learn a lot more from your failures than your rah-rah successes. Barbara Kopple is of course a veteran [filmmaker] and does this brilliantly.

| Sep 1, 2020

It felt a little bit dry to me. Having a lot of perspectives is good, but it means that you have a long series of talking heads... That said, it was worth watching.

| Sep 1, 2020

Two time Academy Award winning filmmaker Barbara Kopple makes a film and you know that it is going to have several elements to it - excellence, education and entertainment.

| Original Score: 3.5/5 | Aug 30, 2020

"Desert One" is a comprehensive and informative documentary.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Aug 28, 2020

The movie is riveting because there is a legitimately great director behind the camera. Putting the pieces of the historical puzzle together is documentarian Barbara Kopple, who's a living legend in the field.

| Aug 28, 2020

Even if you're already keen to the mission's numerous SNAFUs, it's infinitely more compelling to hear it told by the men who were there, as well as a handful of the 53 hostages the special-ops team sought to extract.

| Original Score: A- | Aug 28, 2020

By giving the servicemen, world leaders and ordinary witnesses from both sides of the crisis the chance to tell their story, Kopple has taken what was becoming a forgotten chapter in history and turned it into compelling cinema.

| Aug 27, 2020

Kopple's approach is so thorough that the film often takes the breath away. The range of interviewees alone makes it worth a look, as they recount personal anecdotes and perceptions.

| Original Score: 4.5/5 | Aug 27, 2020

Kopple finds a way to make Desert One a rousing film that ultimately works as a symbol for American imperialism. It makes patriotism out of the rubble of abject failure.

| Original Score: B | Aug 27, 2020

The most powerful and moving section of the film is the telling of the how the operation itself went from bad to worse...

| Original Score: 3.5/4 | Aug 27, 2020

Barbara Kopple is one of America's greatest and most important documentary directors.

| Aug 26, 2020

[Barbara] Kopple is an impeccable documentarian.

| Aug 24, 2020

If Desert One is visually just a series of talking heads -- with the actual mission depicted, lamentably, in graphic-novel-style illustrations -- the story is scintillatingly told by those who lived it, including Carter himself

| Aug 24, 2020

It's a masterly piece of cinema that courageously takes on a rarely-addressed theme: failure.

| Aug 24, 2020