Ezra.

"No sugarcoating it: Ezra is a difficult film to watch," writes Michael Joshua Rowin at indieWIRE. "It isn't particularly graphic or gory, but its dramatization of children being kidnapped and forced into fighting - or, really, raping and pillaging - by rebel armies in Sierra Leone is extremely upsetting, and all the more terrifying for alluding to greater and more incomprehensible crimes occurring in reality. As directed by Nigerian filmmaker Newton I Aduaka, Ezra is often messy and awkwardly told, but even its amateurishness lends a sort of raw power to its harrowing depiction of dehumanization, exploitation, senseless violence, and the post-conflict attempts at 'Truth and Reconciliation' as promoted by the series of human rights hearings set up to make some sort of sense of the devastation of a decade-long civil war."

Updated through 2/14.

"Unlike many of its Western-made counterparts, Ezra neither condescends to its African characters (or culture) nor shies away from the grim, brutal violence that dominates so much of the continent," writes Nick Schager in Slant. "Unfortunately, [the] film has its own raft of problems, which eventually conspire to drain its relevant, pressing story... of coherence and intensity."

For the New York Sun, S James Snyder talks with Aduaka; so does indieWIRE.

Updates, 2/12: "Unsparing, pedagogic, and genuinely compelling, Ezra, like Ed Zwick's 2006 Blood Diamond, supplies context aplenty for the armed children springing up all over Africa, fingering the tainted diamond industry that lines the pockets of Northern Hemisphere profiteers while exacerbating vicious civil wars across the continent," writes Ella Taylor in the Voice.

"The opening primes you to expect one atrocity after another, but half an hour in, Ezra takes a sharp turn in the direction of compassionate humanism," writes David Edelstein in New York.

Updates, 2/13: "For viewers in a nation at war whose re-integration programs are inadequate, Ezra's treatment of soldiers' psychology may emerge as its most poignant strength," suggests Benjamin Sutton in the L Magazine.

"Mr Aduaka, the film's Nigerian-born director, deserves credit for attempting something that was probably impossible," writes Stephen Holden in the New York Times.

"Aduaka apparently has more interest in Ezra's psychological disarray than the corruption responsible for it," notes the Reeler.

"While I applaud the nobility inherent in the attempt to create a cinematic record of an important piece of history, this is simply a case where a highly skilled director is paired with the wrong story," writes Lauren Wissot at the House Next Door.

Update, 2/14: "This is cinema as psychological warfare, and every moment of calm bears the weight of its imminent destruction," writes Benjamin Sutton in the New York Press.

Posted by dwhudson at February 9, 2008 10:51 AM