Recensioni de* critic*

As a political statement, Camp X Ray works better than a more strident message might have; and as a story about the capacity for humans to connect against all odds, this movie was a great success.

“Camp X-Ray” has a great idea behind it... but first-time writer-director Peter Sattler doesn’t go anywhere interesting with that notion. Neither the soldier nor the detainee emerges as a particularly memorable character, and while the ongoing situation at Gitmo is a fertile topic for discussion, Sattler doesn’t bring much to the conversation.

It helps if you think of “Camp X-Ray”... as a cautionary conversation unfolding more like a theater production than a movie... Otherwise, the drama has a tendency to slip into stereotypes a bit too easily, military misogyny, terrorist ideology and xenophobia among them... By boiling too much down to black and white, “Camp X-Ray’s” ability to say something significant is diluted.

Stewart rarely overplays a moment... It’s a shame that the film around her lacks the same subtlety... Above all, Camp X-Ray frustrates for stacking its deck in the usual ways that Hollywood addresses the War on Terror, or really any subject dealing with America’s racism.

“Camp X-Ray” has cinematic and moral intelligence... [It is] a quiet, patient drama... one of the better mainstream American film portraits of what happened to America’s psyche after 9/11: the moral numbness that set in right away, and never entirely lifted.

Camp X-Ray segues from being an utterly average potboiler to a flummoxing would-be polemic. The film seems to fancy itself a step-by-step procedural, yet Sattler’s script confirms nothing for the audience that they couldn’t discern from the get-go.

At times, the screenplay rings curiously simplistic... [and] we get entirely too many frustratingly pat little moments. Luckily, the film is on more solid footing when focusing on the drudgery of life at Gitmo, and on the minute little interactions through which its two central figures come to know each other.

“Camp X-Ray” is as transparent in its message as the title suggests, and the scan shows a malignant tumor in the very bones of the film’s structure. An on-the-nose approach smothers all subtext into submission and leaves nothing of interest alive.

Despite the movie’s gripping performances and the verisimilitude of many elements, I simply don’t believe the story... When “Camp X-Ray” finally turns sentimental, you may feel betrayed.

It is in Sattler’s screenplay where all the film’s demons are found. Any sense of real attachment, genuine conflict, or emotional build-up to the cathartic climax are subdued and killed before ever getting a chance to reach us, thanks to a self-aware script bordering on the ridiculous.

A credulity-straining duet between two fine actors... Camp X-Ray is a fundamentally toothless film, sanitized for viewers’ protection.

Camp X-Ray has too narrow a scope to offer much; yet it’s impossible not to be affected by its depiction of utter hopelessness for those illegally imprisoned in Guantanamo Bay... Stewart, in almost every scene, convinces as the strong-willed but inchoate Amy... Moaadi, so good in A Separation, is again mesmerising.