For a movie that just opened yesterday in New York and a few other major cities, veteran director Brian De Palma’s Redacted already has generated powerful feelings just like the Iraq war it depicts.
This movie was a prizewinner in Venice and received decidedly mixed reviews at festivals in Telluride, Toronto and New York. I myself haven’t seen a De Palma movie in years that I thought was worth spilling popcorn over, but I can’t pass judgment on Redacted until it goes into national release and I can catch it at my local cineplex.
I’ve followed early reviews of Redacted with interest because its centerpiece is an incident about which I’ve blogged extensively: The gang rape-murder of 15-year-old Abeer Qasim Hamza al-Janabi and killing of her family in Mahmoudiyah in March 2006. (Click here for my overview and here for a discussion on psychotic soldiers by TMV co-blogger and noted psychoanalyst and author Dr. Clarissa Pinkola Estés.)
Click here to go to Kiko’s House for excerpts of reviews of Redacted from movie critics A.O. Scott of the New York Times and Kenneth Turan of the Los Angeles Times, as well as New Yorker magazine writer George Packard, whose commentaries on and from Iraq have been among the very best.