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12/06/05
September Tapes (2004)
21 %
Reviews Counted: 34 Fresh: 7 Rotten:27 Average Rating: 3.8/10
Runtime: 1 hr 31 mins
Synopsis: An incredible achievement, SEPTEMBER TAPES chronicles one man's attempt to find notorious terrorist leader Osama bin Laden. Don Larsen is the man responsible for the filming; an intrepid documentarian, he was joined by a bounty hunter in his exhaustive search of the dangerous Afghan... [More]
Genre: Education/General Interest
Reviews
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07/21/05
Finally, there are no truths, higher or lower, in September Tapes...just a lot of din.
10/06/04
Johnston's rough-hewn handheld footage generates a sense of dread as a defining force behind the camera, more concrete than any onscreen images.
09/30/04
Top Critic
It's riddled with stilted voice-overs and eye-rollingly awful dialogue.
09/25/04
It's hard to make a case for an American film that intentionally mixes fact with fiction when the facts concerning 9/11, the Taliban and the fate of Al Qaeda leader Osama Bin Laden are already so elusive.
09/24/04
Afghanistan shouldn't be used as a backdrop for some director's selfish attempt at provocation.
09/24/04
The film itself still feels faked, and its calculated exploitation of some real tragedies may be the most unbelievable thing of all.
09/24/04
The whole notion of exploiting a war and its victims to shoot a commercial feature is reprehensible.
09/24/04
Squanders incredible verisimilitude by undercutting it with credibility-defying storytelling.
09/24/04
Top Critic
Credit September Tapes with raising thorny questions about what forms of cinematic storytelling do justice to truth.
09/24/04
Eventually collapses under the weight of its no-budget arrogance, but it goes some interesting places beforehand.
09/24/04
War porn, an amateurish and incomprehensible mishmash of alleged fact and fiction.
09/24/04
It shares a lot with the Hollywood product: a forced gimmick, a dislikable protagonist, a transparent plot twist and a lot of unconvincing drama.
09/24/04
This disturbing docudrama is a remarkable achievement on many levels.
09/24/04
It yanks us eyes-first into a place that we, in our living rooms, have known only as a cliché.
09/24/04
Alternating between the despicable and the inept and sometimes capturing both in a single moment, September Tapes is a craven attempt to cash in on the 9/11 tragedy.
09/24/04
A hybrid, containing both fictional and real elements. As often happens with such efforts, the movie doesn't fully succeed in meeting the demands of either side of a complex equation.
09/24/04
Related Forums
MPAA ALERT: September tapes lands an R rating for language & violent images...
by: Real Boba 9/5/04
by: Real Boba 9/5/04
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