No End in Sight 2007

Critics score:
96 / 100

Reviews provided by RottenTomatoes

Michael Phillips, Chicago Tribune: [No End in Sight] may be the best and saddest film of the year so far. Read more

J. R. Jones, Chicago Reader: Ferguson is admirably tenacious in assigning blame for the boneheaded mistakes that have doomed Iraqi reconstruction. Read more

Tom Keogh, Seattle Times: Its list of interviewees includes a number of insiders once deeply involved in the bungled aftermath of America's invasion of Iraq. It also includes some shocking, on-the-ground footage from the war that has not been seen elsewhere. Read more

Mick LaSalle, San Francisco Chronicle: No End in Sight is the most coolheaded of the Iraq war documentaries, the most methodical and the least polemical. Yet it's the one that will leave audiences the most shattered, angry and astounded. Read more

Noel Murray, AV Club: So No End In Sight is hardly another partisan anti-war doc. Instead, it's a cogent, often infuriating explication of how the execution of the war went awry. Read more

Wesley Morris, Boston Globe: A raft of documentaries have come along since the start of the war, some of them accusatory, some investigative, some empathetic, nearly all of them skeptical. None is better argued or more searing than No End in Sight. Read more

Dennis Lim, Los Angeles Times: No End in Sight, the latest Iraq documentary, is the first to attempt a detailed historical overview and probably the only one with the potential to reach across partisan lines, a true rarity in the sphere of political filmmaking. Read more

Peter Rainer, Christian Science Monitor: Although this is Ferguson's first feature -- he paid for it himself -- it's a masterfully assured piece of filmmaking. Read more

Lisa Kennedy, Denver Post: No End in Sight makes one thing clear: Were it not so bloody, the war in Iraq would be destined to become a case study in the nation's business schools. Read more

Owen Gleiberman, Entertainment Weekly: Leaves you furious at an administration of armchair warriors, yet it offers the catharsis of cold, hard truth. Read more

Terry Lawson, Detroit Free Press: Ferguson's case is so confidently built that it seems unassailable... Read more

Christy Lemire, Associated Press: No End in Sight will leave you floored, agape and enraged anew. Read more

Tim Grierson, L.A. Weekly: ...his [Ferguson's] brilliant and riveting documentary about the Bush administration's failures in Iraq, is at once the most devastating cinematic postmortem on America's colossal blunder in the Middle East, and the most sober. Read more

Jan Stuart, Newsday: ...words speak even louder than visual evidence in Charles Ferguson's lacerating analysis of America's occupation of Iraq. Read more

David Ansen, Newsweek: Read more

David Denby, New Yorker: We need to hear the story again and again, for no amount of rage and disbelief can turn what the Bush Administration did into someone else's problem. Read more

David Edelstein, New York Magazine/Vulture: Soberly narrated by Campbell Scott, the film is a meticulous, thoroughly engrossing lesson in how not to win friends (or wars) and influence people (or potential terrorists). Read more

Bob Mondello, NPR.org: Read more

Jack Mathews, New York Daily News: The most compelling and least partisan of all the Iraq documentaries. Read more

Kyle Smith, New York Post: Rehashes information you already knew and tries to inflate trivia into scandal. Read more

Roger Moore, Orlando Sentinel: This is a movie about the very officials who boasted 'I don't do quagmires' (then-defense secretary Rumsfeld), but who hadn't actually done the planning or simple reading of other people's plans that might have avoided that very fate. Read more

Carrie Rickey, Philadelphia Inquirer: Lucid, concise and devastating. Read more

Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times: Remember the scene in A Clockwork Orange where Alex has his eyes clamped open and is forced to watch a movie? I imagine a similar experience for the architects of our catastrophe in Iraq. I would like them to see No End in Sight. Read more

Andrew O'Hehir, Salon.com: A systematic and rigorous history of the Iraq war to date. Read more

Colin Covert, Minneapolis Star Tribune: Even dedicated news junkies will gain new understanding of a campaign with no end in sight. Read more

St. Louis Post-Dispatch: Read more

Globe and Mail: A tidy summary of the tragic mistakes made, and the brutal arrogance displayed, by the Bush administration in its prosecution of the Iraq war. Read more

Cliff Doerksen, Time Out: Read more

David Fear, Time Out: Read more

Robert Koehler, Variety: [Director] Ferguson delivers the calm, meticulous survey of U.S. policy that legions of critics of Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11 have been waiting for. Read more

Stephen Hunter, Washington Post: It's a furious, if quietly stated, indictment of the president and all his men in the debacle that our adventure in Iraq has become. Read more