The documentary and accompanying book contain a good deal of valuable and harrowing material.

| Mar 5, 2021

Even the title of this nuanced and layered interrogation doesn't come into focus until the third act, as Oscar-winning doc-maker Errol Morris gets too close for comfort to the multiple deadly meanings behind the shocking pictures from Abu Ghraib prison.

| Jun 1, 2020

Errol Morris' documentary... should be seen by all Americans but probably will viewed only by a relative handful.

| Mar 3, 2019

Morris eschews sensationalist reporting to conduct a procedural investigation that wonders what the photos tell us about the morality of those commanding the American forces.

| Nov 4, 2018

Both Morris's film and the book based on it by Gourevitch are devastating, even without going into detail about the complicity, or indeed responsibility, of top officials in the Bush administration.

| Aug 29, 2018

Morris is more interested in the pictures she's in than in England herself. He didn't need her in person to make this film. Yet there she is, dragged in to redeem herself so she can be admitted into humankind.

| Apr 26, 2018

Standard Operating Procedure seeks answers to questions that are usually purely rhetorical: Who would do such a thing to another human being? And why would you want to photograph it?

| Aug 21, 2017

Morris' manic devotion to detail ultimately does the film in.

| Apr 18, 2016

A female face: unformed personalities the equivalent of the portrayal of naïveté by Sissy Spacek in "Badlands." An improbable horror movie about metadata and its discontents.

| Apr 8, 2014

The film's bloody dramatizations...suggest a fundamental distrust of the efficacy of the word over the image and a bland assumption that audiences have lost their ability to empathize.

| Nov 14, 2013

A bore and a real pain to sit through.

| Original Score: C | Aug 9, 2011

Fascinating and horrifying, especially if you take a step back and view it thinking about what it tells us about the society in which these abuses took place.

Full Review | Original Score: 79/100 | Dec 5, 2008

Examines both the mystery of primitive human instincts and the nature and power of photography.

| Original Score: 8/10 | Nov 14, 2008

For American military personnel to descend to Saddam's level was one of the worst moments in US history, and Morris's film reveals the truth: the poisonous Abu Ghraib pictures were not merely an American scandal but a human catastrophe.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Oct 18, 2008

| Original Score: B | Oct 18, 2008

Morris's distillation of long talks with young ex-soldiers and the female general who commanded prisons all over Iraq is among the best documentaries on the Iraq war.

| Oct 18, 2008

| Original Score: 3/5 | Oct 18, 2008

| Original Score: B+ | Oct 18, 2008

Morris never gets close to the administrative attitude that apparently sanctioned, perhaps even encouraged the goings-on, despite Karpinski's contention that 'none of this produced useful intelligence.'

| Oct 18, 2008

Haunting photographs and video seemingly point a finger at the low-ranking indicted soldiers. Equally haunting is the notion that journalists and the public assumed they had seen everything.

Full Review | Original Score: 3.5/4 | Oct 18, 2008