Critic Reviews

One of the strengths of Sattler’s screenplay is his refusal to make this a straightforward drama about enemies, injustice or dehumanizing persecution. He makes it about empathy, and in doing so broadens the intimate story to find thematic universality.

Camp X-Ray has cinematic and moral intelligence.

It's that kind of performance, while holding her own with misogynistic soldiers and combing her hair with a plastic knife, that makes Stewart's talent stand at attention more than anything else.

Camp X-Ray is most commendable for believably depicting the U.S. military from a female’s point of view.

With its painfully plain-spoken conflicts and eventually oversold gestures of kindness, Camp X-Ray may offer frustratingly little insight into the hazy world of wartime morality, but if nothing else, it suggests that Stewart may escape her own “Twilight”-shaped prison yet.

First-time writer/director Peter Sattler finds a few surprises to throw at us in this somewhat conventional “Stockholm Syndrome” story.

The gray, drab monotony of the setting seeps into the marrow of the prison drama Camp X-Ray, though it’s invigorated, somewhat, by strong central performances from actors on opposite sides of a locked steel door.

It is down to the strength of the acting that the film succeeds as far as it does.

For much of its running time, Camp X-Ray stands as the fullest on-screen imaginative treatment of two of the defining developments of the last 15 years of American life: the deployment of women in our volunteer army, and the indefinite detention of men we think, but can't quite prove, deserve it.

A credulity-straining duet between two fine actors.