Camp X-Ray

The baggage Stewart brings to 'Camp X-Ray' makes its first hour more compelling than anything in the screenplay.

Camp X-Ray raises quite a few fascinating questions about power, sexism, and war, yet fails to explore them in any real depth. More troubling still, it's a character study that does little in the way of character development.

It's invigorated, somewhat, by strong central performances from actors on opposite sides of a locked steel door.

Writer-director Peter Sattler... grounds his story in the cold operational detail of Gitmo, showing how the soldiers there administer the legal limbo of indefinite detention and insulate themselves from the cruelty and injustice of what they're doing.

On another movie, the high-corn finale might have worked; here, it just feels patently false.

Has a great idea behind it - a young female soldier assigned guard duty at Guantanamo Bay forms a kinship with one of the incarcerated Muslims - but first-time writer-director Peter Sattler doesn't go anywhere interesting with that notion.

Notwithstanding good performances, potent imagery and cinematic flair, Camp X-Ray does not cut deep nor surprise. The film stretches some boundaries but breaks none.

The final 15 minutes betray the first 100, hammering all themes into our skulls. It's an unnecessarily on-the-nose finish to a mostly organic central relationship.

This is an excellent movie. It is a powerful drama set at the Guantanamo Bay prison. It avoids political posturing and gets down the human interaction between guards and prisoners, while avoiding the usual prison clichés.

Superbly unsettling. Pointedly highlights how incarceration dehumanizes inmate and guard alike. Kristen Stewart's steeliness is perfectly suited to its ironies.