60
Metascore
16 reviews · Provided by Metacritic.com
- 88TV Guide MagazineKen FoxTV Guide MagazineKen FoxPhil Donahue and Ellen Spiro's powerful documentary takes a microcosmic look at the war and its devastation by focusing on a single casualty.
- 83The A.V. ClubNoel MurrayThe A.V. ClubNoel MurrayBody Of War purposefully depicts an America in turmoil. But it also depicts an America far more capable of living with contradictions than the "Red State/Blue State"-obsessed cable-news pundits would have us believe.
- 78Austin ChronicleMarc SavlovAustin ChronicleMarc SavlovOne of the most affecting and certainly the most intimate of the cinematic arguments against the war in Iraq yet made.
- 75Philadelphia InquirerCarrie RickeyPhiladelphia InquirerCarrie RickeyThe parade of senators parroting the rationale for invasion - what we now know was misinformation - does not undermine Young's story. Given the private's eloquence, the flashbacks to 2002 are superfluous.
- 70Village VoiceVillage VoiceNeither the most cinematic nor the most elegantly crafted of recent Iraq War documentaries, but that doesn't stop it from being one of the most deeply affecting. Where Spiro and Donahue triumph is in putting a human face on the war.
- 60VarietyVarietyBy documenting the difficult life of their paraplegic subject, helmers Ellen Spiro and Phil Donahue succeed in personalizing some of the war's grim statistics, but the purview of their portrait feels too limited for the pic to play widely.
- 50The Hollywood ReporterThe Hollywood ReporterThis movie wants to help make things better. But it also -- fervently, and for a purpose -- holds a grudge.
- There's never any mistaking the film's politics. If they were any different, it would be a surprise, given that the co-director and executive producer is the onetime talk-show god and lifelong liberal Donahue. But it is a film (as opposed to a collection of talking heads, Michael Moore-style ambushes or Robert Greenwaldian shorthand).
- 50The New York TimesManohla DargisThe New York TimesManohla DargisThere is another body of war at issue here, however, and it’s this body that throws the documentary off kilter and eventually off course: Congress.
- 25New York PostKyle SmithNew York PostKyle SmithLazy, shallow and repetitive, Phil Donahue's Body of War is one of the most incompetent documentaries to emerge from the Iraq war.