Taxi To the Dark Side (2007)
Jigsaw Productions

Description

Disturbing and incisive, the Academy Award-winner Taxi To The Dark Side incorporates rare and never-before-seen images from inside the Bagram Air Force Base in Afghanistan and Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay prisons into its exposure of the Bush administration's "global war on terror." This stunningly crafted narrative demonstrates how this one man's life and death symbolizes the erosion of our civil rights and how what it means to be an American has changed forever.

Tags

2000s, Afghanistan, War on terror, war crimes, torture, Academy Award winner, Guantanamo Bay, Iraq, Abu Ghraib

Collected reviews and ratings

10 Amazon user reviews

With this extraordinary film director Alex Gibney makes a convincing and well researched case against the acts of torture, abuse and humiliation committed by the U.S. military against political prisoners in Iraq, Afghanistan and Guantanamo Bay.
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10 PopMatters.com | Cynthia Fuchs

Methodically, relentlessly, Gibney’s Oscar-nominated film assembles stories, evidence, and testimony witnesses and experts - its deliberate structure recalls that of Charles Ferguson’s No End in Sight.
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9.4 DVD Verdict | Franck Tabouring

I can not stress it often enough: you have to see this movie. I understand the subject matter is quite heavy and some of the scenes are though to digest, but the truth behind this issue is too disturbing to ignore.
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9.2 Entertainment Weekly | Lisa Schwarzbaum

Occasionally, extraneous production flourishes - tricky graphic design, redundantly ominous music - push harder than necessary to tell the story. Then again, if music and shocking pictures are key to consciousness-raising, then hey, crank them up.
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8.8 TV Guide | Ken Fox

The parade of images Gibney has assembled, many of which are seen here in full color for the very first time, amounts to an atrocity exhibition that's difficult to watch, but demands to be seen.
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8.0 New York Times | A.O. Scott

Plenty of moviegoers would happily pay not to think about the issues raised in “Taxi to the Dark Side.” But sooner or later we will need to understand what has happened in this country in the last seven years, and this documentary will be essential to that effort.
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8.0 DVD Talk | Jamie S. Rich

The documentary has no such political axe to grind. There is no right or left here, no Red States or Blue States, just a human approach to a human problem. It's the aspect of this story that is so often lost in the current contentious climate.
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7.0 Variety | Jay Weissberg

Photos and video of torture at Bagram and Abu Ghraib are the most viscerally disturbing elements of "Taxi to the Dark Side," but the way soft-spoken soldiers were transformed into beasts with the tacit approval of the higher-ups is just as profoundly chilling.
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7.0 Washington Post | John Anderson

Even the most dedicated supporter of the "war on terror" might have trouble digesting what Alex Gibney serves up in his latest film, "Taxi to the Dark Side," whether it's the crimes that have been perpetrated in the name of freedom, or the people who've had to pay for those crimes.
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