Trouble the Water 2008

David Edelstein, New York Magazine/Vulture: Trouble the Water is ineradicably moving. Read more

Joanne Kaufman, Wall Street Journal: Filmmakers Tia Lessin and Carl Deal have fashioned a deeply moving story of resilience and redemption. Read more

John Hartl, Seattle Times: More than most documentaries, this mosaiclike movie is made up of many pieces, and it's considerably more than the sum of those parts. Read more

Noel Murray, AV Club: Trouble The Water is infuriating in its depiction of helpless Americans getting left behind, and uplifting in the way it shows the Roberts putting their lives together. Read more

Wesley Morris, Boston Globe: Read more

Kenneth Turan, Los Angeles Times: More than a keenly dramatic look at how this country treats the poor and dispossessed. It's also a film that was hijacked by its subjects. They saw an opportunity, they took it, and the grand jury prize at Sundance was the result. Read more

Joe Leydon, Houston Chronicle: You can't help wanting -- and maybe needing -- to read into her indomitable spiritedness something like a reason for hope. For her, for other Katrina survivors, for all of us. Read more

Lisa Kennedy, Denver Post: A tale of natural and civic catastrophe, Trouble the Water is also a frank yet inspired saga about poverty, survival and what lies beyond. Read more

Lisa Schwarzbaum, Entertainment Weekly: Essential, unique viewing: a stunning experience of the hurricane and its aftermath, rooted in immediate personal response and emotions that encapsulate the full national catastrophe. Read more

John Anderson, Newsday: Brilliant melding of first-person footage, heart, and directors Tia Lessin and Carl Deal's documentary expertise. Read more

David Denby, New Yorker: Trouble the Water, along with Spike Lee's extraordinary four-hour epic, When the Levees Broke, remains one of the most eloquent records we have of a tragedy that brought out some of the most impressively alive men and women in New O Read more

Joe Neumaier, New York Daily News: Using mostly amateur video shot by an aspiring rap artist and her husband in the lead-up to Hurricane Katrina and in the weeks after, this gripping, sometimes unstructured doc shows the devastation New Orleans residents suffered in the swirl of the storm. Read more

Roger Moore, Orlando Sentinel: It's not quite a Grapes of Wrath for our times, but Trouble the Water does give a voice to people America didn't see or listen to before Katrina. Read more

David Hiltbrand, Philadelphia Inquirer: Trouble the Water is choppy, overly long and at times almost indecipherable, but it's indelible. Read more

Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times: Roberts needs more practice at holding the camera steady and framing shots. It doesn't matter. We feel her footage at the base of our spines. Read more

Andrew O'Hehir, Salon.com: What Lessin and Deal provide is a considered structure that places Roberts' footage within a larger social and emotional context as part of a self-defined life, in which Hurricane Katrina was both tragedy and opportunity. Read more

Ruthe Stein, San Francisco Chronicle: Is there more to be said about this national catastrophe? Yes, definitely, as the engrossing documentary Trouble the Water shows in just about every frame. Read more

Colin Covert, Minneapolis Star Tribune: Trouble the Water proves that a couple of gutsy amateurs with a home video camera can work wonders. Read more

Joe Williams, St. Louis Post-Dispatch: Trouble the Water is a crucial film, one of the best of the decade. Read more

Rick Groen, Globe and Mail: The person at the centre emerges as a force of nature unto herself. Meet, and prepare to be inspired by, Kimberly Rivers Roberts. Read more

Peter Howell, Toronto Star: 'God's gonna trouble the water,' goes the chorus from the African-American spiritual that gives Trouble the Water its title, but no deity is to blame for the tide of bureaucratic bungling and inhumanity the movie reveals. Read more

Hank Sartin, Time Out: Read more

David Fear, Time Out: Trouble the Water's political-made-personal power to invoke both Anderson Cooper levels of rage and the sense that hope springs eternal rests solely with its main subjects. Read more

Wally Hammond, Time Out: Essential, startling and distressing insight into what it was like to be in the eye of the Katrina storm if you were a poor, black resident of the Ninth Ward of New Orleans on Monday August 29 2005. Read more

Robert Koehler, Variety: [Subject Kimberly] Roberts' vid reps some of the more extensive by any Katrina survivor. Read more

Jim Ridley, Village Voice: The resilience of the movie's subjects -- survivors of street crime and drugs and HIV -- irradiates Trouble the Water like sunshine. Read more