Critic Reviews

Director-writer Steven Silver deftly juxtaposes exciting (and sometimes horrific) battle re-creations with scenes of the photographers' personal lives.

Writer-director Steven Silver (with an able assist from cinematographer Miroslaw Baszak) captures this brutal time - which led to the country's first free, multiracial elections in 1994 and the end of apartheid - in vivid, often bold, but never overpowering strokes.

The story has heat, even if the movie is more entranced with its subjects than in what they're trying to achieve.

Unfortunately, Silver's movie doesn't cut deep enough: It glosses over some thorny questions and hammers too fixedly on others.

When all is said and done, their Pulitzer-winning photographs prove more potent than this well-intended but frustratingly generic picture.

Club's entertainment value suffers at the expense of trying to capture the events as they happened -- an ill-advised endeavor, considering everything.

Writer-director Silver, who trained in documentaries, appears flummoxed by the challenges of getting the audience inside the heads of these young men.

Silver means to get across the adrenaline rush of lives lived in dangerous extremes, but winds up trivializing their accomplishments and making them seem like men of hearty appetites, but little intellectual depth.

This question, which will instinctively occur to many viewers, is never quite dealt with in the film. The photographers sometimes drive into the middle of violent situations, hold up a camera, and say "press!" - as if that will solve everything.

Why, then, do we care not one bit when Pulitzers are won and bullets unsuccessfully dodged? The answer lies partly in Mr. Silver's refusal to elucidate the racial politics or engage with the world outside the film's incoherently chaotic bubble.