No End in Sight (2007)
Red Envelope Entertainment

Description

The first film of its kind to chronicle the reasons behind Iraqs descent into guerilla war, warlord rule, criminality and anarchy, No End in Sight is a jaw-dropping, insiders tale of wholesale incompetence, recklessness and venality. Based on over 200 hours of footage, the film provides a candid retelling of the events following the fall of Baghdad in 2003 by high ranking officials such as former Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage, Ambassador Barbara Bodine (in charge of Baghdad during the spring of 2003), Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson, former chief of staff to Colin Powell, and General Jay Garner (in charge of occupation of Iraq through May 2003), as well as Iraqi civilians, American soldiers and prominent analysts.

Tags

Iraq

Collected reviews and ratings

10 All About Jazz | Richard Schickel

Who knew that a bunch of medium shots of well-spoken, nicely dressed men and women could transcend mere journalism and bring us very close to the authentic tragedy lurking behind the Green Zone's concrete walls.
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10 Entertainment Weekly | Owen Gleiberman

No End in Sight is a coolheaded and devastating exposé of the Bush administration's bungling of the Iraq war — a definitive anatomy of disaster, directed by Charles Ferguson with a thirst for history that transcends ideology.
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9.2 The Onion A.V. Club | Noel Murray

Perhaps the most damning aspect of Charles Ferguson's Iraq War critique No End In Sight is that even supporters of U.S. military intervention will agree with a lot of it.
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9.0 All About Jazz | Dennis Lim

"No End in Sight," which gets across the sheer scale and depth of this appalling failure in 100 minutes, is a model of concision and clarity.
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9.0 New York Times | A.O. Scott

It’s a sober, revelatory and absolutely vital film.
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9.0 Amazon user reviews

Director Charles Ferguson's film is a searing indictment of the recklessness, gross incompetence, and political cynicism of the Bush administration.
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8.8 TV Guide | Ken Fox

Charles Ferguson's incisive, "the story thus far" documentary covers the first four years in a postwar history that has achieved a kind of classically tragic dimension. It's filled with hubris, miscalculation, willful blindness, betrayal, chaos and dismal failure, and Ferguson tells it all with clear, almost brutal concision.
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8.0 Washington Post | Stephen Hunter

The script of Charles Ferguson's "No End in Sight" would certainly be in the hands of prosecutors in the event of impeachment hearings. The documentary is a furious, if quietly stated, indictment of the president and all his men in re the debacle that our adventure in Iraq has turned into.
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8.0 Salon.com | Andrew O'Hehir

From the first frames of Charles Ferguson's "No End in Sight," replaying some of the oddest and twitchiest podium performances of Donald Rumsfeld during those heady days of spring 2003, you may feel the crushing weight of an almost Sophoclean impending doom.
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7.0 Variety | Robert Koehler

An expert on information technology, a visiting scholar at M.I.T. and UC-Berkeley as well as a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and the Brookings Institution, Ferguson boasts unusually deep bona fides for a filmmaker. With the sure assistance of editors Chad Beck and Cindy Lee, the daunting roster of talking heads is molded into an immediate film-watching experience.
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