| Original Score: B | Feb 18, 2012

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

But Rendition, in the end, is a Lifetime movie with pretensions toward being a political thriller. (They could even call it YOU HAVE MY HUSBAND! since Witherspoon shrieks that at Streep in a ludicrous scene.)

| May 1, 2008

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

I don't fault Rendition for its liberal politics. I fault it for hammering home those politics in such pounding, slanted fashion.

Full Review | Oct 22, 2007

If these new, allegedly topical movies are to make us feel anything -- to move us toward any action or even just toward any fresh realization -- they need to at least seem alive on the screen, instead of just courting our polite, measured applause.

Full Review | Oct 20, 2007

That it's embarrassingly plausible, that it depicts things that have happened and that are probably still happening, is enough to make Americans sick to their stomach.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Oct 19, 2007

What finally gives Rendition its headlong narrative momentum is the sense that we're rarely certain what argument the filmmakers are endorsing.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/4 | Oct 19, 2007

It's one thing for a thriller to be timely, quite another for it to function as Rendition does, a gripping piece of entertainment with a clear head on its shoulders.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Oct 19, 2007

Rendition, while engrossing, does not grab us as it should.

Full Review | Original Score: 2.5/4 | Oct 19, 2007

As it goes about hitting its predictable marks, including a reassuring burst of moral outrage, Rendition suffers, finally, from not being extraordinary enough.

| Oct 19, 2007

Morose instead of outraged and static instead of penetrating.

| Original Score: 2/4 | Oct 19, 2007

[Hood] can be accused of one-siding the debate over interrogation tactics like water-boarding and electrocution. But since when do movies have to be fair and balanced?

| Original Score: 3/4 | Oct 19, 2007

A pat and generic, if serviceable, political thriller.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Oct 19, 2007

Rendition succumbs to a fatal imbalance brought on by terminal star power.

| Original Score: C | Oct 19, 2007

A movie whose hot-button political issues already seem too warmed and worried over.

Full Review | Original Score: 2/4 | Oct 19, 2007

It raises worthwhile quandaries and delivers flashes of acting prowess -- from Streep in particular.

Full Review | Original Score: 2.5/4 | Oct 19, 2007

It's all too simplistic to really engage the deeply complex dilemma it seeks to pass judgment on.

| Original Score: C | Oct 19, 2007

What the film documents is that we have lost faith in due process and the rule of law, and have forfeited the moral high ground.

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

Occasionally a movie's subject outweighs any aesthetic flaws, as it does in this unsettling thriller about the extraordinary rendition of terror suspects.

| Oct 19, 2007