No End in Sight.

"If failure, as the saying goes, is an orphan," writes AO Scott in the New York Times, "then No End in Sight can be thought of as a brief in a paternity suit, offering an emphatic, well- supported answer to a question that has already begun to be mooted on television talk shows and in journals of opinion: Who lost Iraq?"

"[W]e 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," insists David Denby in the New Yorker. "The occupation is our problem, a dead eagle hanging around our necks. Though the facts in No End in Sight are well known, the movie is still a classic."

"If everybody in this polarized country could be convinced to sit down tonight and watch the documentaries No End in Sight and The Devil Came on Horseback, we might pull our troops out of Iraq next week and send them to Darfur the week after that," writes Andrew O'Hehir, who talks with director Charles Ferguson for Salon. But then, "We were too busy fucking up Iraq to save the people of Darfur, apparently."

Updated through 8/7.

"The body of Ferguson's film is concerned with the catastrophic minutiae of 'postwar' reconstruction and security, or lack thereof, and this is where the film steps completely into an inoffensive 'centrist' borderland so comfortably occupied at present by most of the mainstream media," argues Michael Atkinson for In These Times. "Granted, Ferguson's focus on individual acts and decisions is admirably thorough - Cheney & Co. are never far from being held accountable (unlike Bush, whom Ferguson presumes is a complete stooge), from the ridiculous lack of reconstructive planning and the inadequate employment of troops, to Paul Bremer's policy decisions that essentially created an angry, jobless and bloodthirsty insurgent army out of the standing Iraqi military, and therein helped turn a beleaguered country on the edge of decimation into a killing field. In fact, Ferguson has little work to do here - the press conferences of Rumsfeld alone could be edited together into the most damning, ludicrous portrait of duplicitous American power ever assembled. But the film depends also on fresh talking-heads interviews, specifically with the likes of ex-ORHA director Jay Garner, Col Paul Hughes, ex-Ambassador Barbara Bodine, ex-Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage, and ex-Coalition Provisional Authority senior advisor Walter Slocombe, who provide a minute-by-minute recounting of what went so terribly wrong on the ground."

But Time's Richard Schickel calls the doc "without question the most important movie you are likely to see this year. It is not a film that simply massages your pre-existing attitudes about the war in Iraq. Rather it is a work that tells you things you almost certainly did not know about that disaster or things that have been lost to sight as chaos, anarchy and our feelings of helplessness have grown over the years since the invasion of 2003."

"This account - more effective for its dispassion - will bring you to your knees," writes Michelle Orange at the Reeler. "Shame-making and ultimately enraging, if the facts as they are laid out here don't inspire those exposed to them to shake off whatever individual degree of grip our collective torpor has and howl for change until it comes, then we are truly lost."

"Ferguson isn't a clownish lefty rabble-rouser like Michael Moore," notes David Edelstein in New York. "He's a policy wonk with a doctorate from MIT, a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, and the author of three books on information technology. He's interested in How Things Work - and Fall Apart. 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). The best way, it emerges, is not to pay attention, before making a big decision, to people who know stuff."

"Ferguson's reportage may not be completely new, but his use of repetition becomes necessary," writes Ed Gonzalez at Slant. "With at least 25 percent of our country still siding with the politics of Bush's criminal administration, the filmmaker has designed No End in Sight to sink in."

"The evidence speaks for itself, and No End in Sight - addressed to those who'll be swayed against the war by ineptitude more than immorality - is the rare American documentary that doesn't appear to preach to the converted, or at least not only to the converted," writes Rob Nelson in the Voice. "For those of us who've opposed the war for years, the movie is at once intensely frightening and, it must be admitted, disturbingly reassuring. Everything you wanted to suspect about this administration's warmongers but were afraid to fully believe? Here it is."

"No End Sight is much like a cinematic edition of The Iraq War for Dummies," suggests Marcy Dermansky.

Cinematical's James Rocchi talks with Ferguson; so does indieWIRE.

Online listening tip. Ferguson's a guest on the Leonard Lopate Show.

Earlier: "Park City Dispatch. 6."

Update, 8/2: "[A]s dense, urgent and sobering as anything you'll see on American movie screen all year," writes Brandon Harris.

Update, 8/7: Gary Dretzka talks with Ferguson for Movie City News.

Posted by dwhudson at August 1, 2007 3:17 PM