Gunner Palace isn't a particularly violent movie...but every moment is fraught with the potential for violence.

| Mar 13, 2018

| Original Score: A- | Feb 18, 2012

Tucker takes it all in without taking a stand, though his sympathies -- expressed through voiceover narration -- clearly lie with the men and women in the field.

| Original Score: 3.5/4 | Apr 15, 2005

You certainly can't question Tucker's bravery, but you may occasionally feel the urge to ask him to be quiet.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/5 | Apr 7, 2005

While Gunner Palace has the immediacy of street rap, it is actually a throwback to the cinema verite style of pioneering documentarians D.A. Pennebaker, Albert Maysles and Frederick Wiseman.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Mar 25, 2005

The film's strength -- and its weakness -- is in its you-are-there view of guys who are e-mailing their loved ones back home one minute and breaking down the doors of Iraqi homes the next, on the hunt for the enemy.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/4 | Mar 24, 2005

Gunner Palace succeeds as a series of snapshots of the post-war landscape ...

| Original Score: 3/5 | Mar 20, 2005

A bit disjointed but accomplishes its mission: to provide a glimpse into the soldiers' everyday lives without taking a side on the war.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Mar 17, 2005

A doc that doesn't quite live up to its premise but still manages to go beyond packaged news and into the often surreal days and nights of soldiers in a strange, modern war.

| Original Score: B- | Mar 12, 2005

Jammed with information and serious testimony, giving a detailed and textured account of what it's like to be fighting the war more than a year after victory was declared.

| Original Score: 4/4 | Mar 11, 2005

Works purely as a series of complex snapshots of the conflict in Iraq.

| Original Score: 2.5/4 | Mar 11, 2005

This film is so valuable. Not because it argues a position about the war and occupation, but because it simply goes and observes as soldiers work and play, talk and write letters home and, on a daily basis, risk their lives in sudden bursts of violence.

| Original Score: 3.5/4 | Mar 11, 2005

One of the most frightening aspects of the movie is the random feeling it conveys. Another is the shock of seeing such very young soldiers, many of them teenagers, caught up in a war they don't really understand.

| Original Score: 2.5/4 | Mar 11, 2005

We don't get to know the soldiers as individuals well enough.

Full Review | Original Score: 2/4 | Mar 11, 2005

Invaluable if incomplete.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/4 | Mar 11, 2005

Suggests the primacy of movies in shaping both the reality that led these soldiers to enlist and the one they found in Iraq when they got there.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/4 | Mar 10, 2005

A timely and pertinent, if rough-hewn, effort.

Full Review | Mar 10, 2005

I have seen much televised footage of Baghdad from a distance, but I have never before been made aware of how large and built-up a city Baghdad is.

| Mar 10, 2005

Tucker has an eye for arresting imagery, but not the maturity or finesse to illuminate it.

| Original Score: 2/4 | Mar 10, 2005

For most of us, Michael Tucker and Petra Epperlein's riveting documentary will be as close as we ever get to seeing the Iraq war as it has unfolded for the men and women on the ground.

| Mar 5, 2005