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Reviews Counted:60
Fresh:32
Rotten:28
Average Rating:5.6/10
Consensus: The Stoning of Soraya M. nearly transcends its deficiencies through the sheer strength of its subject material, but ultimately drowns out its message with an inappropriately heavy-handed approach.
[It] has strong performances and courageously exposes the horrifying, inhumane Islamic practice of stoning adulterers, but it suffers from poor character development and a contrived script that lacks subtlety, authenticity and emotional resonance.
Soraya's story seems like it could he a fine film, but this isn't it.
...there is something condescending and judgmental in the filmmaker's subtext that seems to exonerate Western culture as somehow less complicit in the atrocious murders that it commits against innocent and guilty citizens alike.
...reduces an admittedly devastating subject matter to a series of eye-rollingly hoary clichés and stereotypes.
Iranian American director Cyrus Nowrasteh has amplified the basic elements of Suraya's story into the worst kind of exploitive Hollywood melodrama, presented under the virtuous guise of moral outrage.
A laughably manipulative melodrama.
It’s a big ol’ wallow in unpleasantness, a film that relies on simplistically patriarchal antagonists and vague, wet-willie cries for intervention.
The film does have a certain crude power. But that's part of the problem with it: It's too crude.
Anyone who thought "The Passion of the Christ," with which this film shares producer Stephen McEveety and star Caviezel, was its own form of torture porn, be forewarned.
The more dramatic the material, the more restrained the approach ought to be.
It gets its point across with all the subtlety, sorry to say, of a rock upside the head.
It is possible to support the journalistic ideal that no stoning should be left unturned while also championing better storytelling.
It's so relentless that it's hard to imagine anyone willingly seeing it on purpose.
The Stoning of Soraya M. functions as a message-movie slasher film.
An exploitative propaganda piece that seems to exist for only one queasy reason--to allow Western audiences to witness the sight of a woman being brutally stoned to death in a sequence staged with all the sadistic delectation of a slasher movie.
At the end, when a photograph of the real Soraya flashes across the screen, your heart breaks for the poor woman, but your ears are relieved that the film has finally stopped shouting at you.
Although The Stoning is efficiently made, it is ultimately a cheat.
This movie is well acted, directed, edited and filmed, however, it is also depressing, uninspiring and sickening. Like a glacier, it moves slowly and inexorably towards its final conclusion.
Often feels more like propaganda than drama.
The Stoning Of Soraya M. crawls forward in excruciating slow motion toward the inevitable day when sinners cast the first, second, third, and fourth (etc.) stone, stacking the deck at every turn along the way.
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