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Waltz with Bashir

2008

Ari Folman

Animation

7.5

23,451

Animation. Drama. War One night at a bar, an old friend tells director Ari about a recurring nightmare in which he is chased by 26 vicious dogs. Every night, the same number of beasts. The two men conclude that there’s a connection to their Israeli Army mission in the first Lebanon War of the early eighties. Ari is surprised that he can’t remember a thing anymore about that period of his life. Intrigued by this riddle, he decides to meet and interview old ... [+]

	Media	Author	Review
		Roger Ebert rogerebert.com	"A devastating animated film (...) Folman is an Israeli documentarian who has not worked in animation. Now he uses it as the best way to reconstruct memories, fantasies, hallucinations, possibilities (...) Rating: ★★★ (out of 4)"
		Peter Bradshaw The Guardian	"An extraordinary film - a military sortie into the past in which both we and Folman are embedded like traumatised reporters (…) Rating: ★★★★ (out of 5)"
		A. O. Scott The New York Times	"[Folman has created] something that is not only unique but also exemplary, a work of astonishing aesthetic integrity and searing moral power."
		Dan Jolin Empire	"A bravura documentary which balances the personal and the political (...) Astonishing, unforgettable: you have to see it (…) Rating: ★★★★★ (out of 5)"
		Anthony Quinn The Independent	"A powerfully ambiguous meditation on personal and collective avoidance."
		Peter Brunette The Hollywood Reporter	"Scenes of violence (...) often have a visceral, poetic power (...) The film is rarely able to sustain any consistent narrative thrust."
		Peter Travers Rolling Stone	"[It] is hallucinatory brilliance in the service of understanding the psychic damage of war (...) Get ready to be knocked for a loop (…) Rating: ★★★½ (out of 5)"
		Dan Fainaru Screendaily	"[It] will leave its mark forever on the ethics of war films in general"
		Jonathan Curiel SFGATE	"[It] allows the audience to enter a kind of forbidden zone where the characters' fantasies seem as realistic as the deadly bullets they faced."
		Tasha Robinson AV Club	"[The memories] are often staggeringly beautiful and personal, with a surreal subjective intensity that gets at the heart of the chaos soldiers perceive in combat"
		Leslie Felperin Variety	"A subject that might, had it been made conventionally, have repped just another docu about a war atrocity, is transmuted via novel use of animation into something special, strange and peculiarly potent"

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