Critic Reviews

Cutter Hodierne's gorgeous, harrowing debut feature, Fishing Without Nets, doesn't just ask you to feel a bit for Somali pirates, as Captain Phillips did -- Hodierne puts you in their shoes.

Cutter Hodierne makes an accomplished feature debut with this very well-crafted, empathetic hijacking drama.

Details count in this movie, whether it’s well-executed camera work or the affecting score.

Cutter Hodierne's Fishing Without Nets is a tense drama with well-drawn characters and only as much action as its story requires.

Fishing Without Nets turns the hijacking drama into a morally murky contemplation of deprivation and desperation.

Though this setup is perhaps infused with too much piety, cheating audience empathy toward the main character, it nonetheless generates a compelling air of social fatalism.

If nothing else, Fishing Without Nets looks good on a big screen, directed in the kind of slick, just-off-arthouse style that mandates every shot of a character walking be framed from behind.

Hodierne’s intentions were unquestionably good—he spent years researching the short and feature, working with Somali non-pros—but he still managed to fall into the same trap as the other American films on this subject, focusing on individuals rather than group dynamics.

Although director and co-writer Cutter Hodierne tells the story from the pirates' viewpoint, he adds no more dimension to them than the one we saw in "Phillips."