REVIEW: Timely Bang Bang Club Loses Focus in Glimpse at War Photographers
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It’s a special disappointment when a movie takes a great subject and lets us down. It’s even more heartbreaking when a movie’s release coincides with a horrific real-life event. Steven Silver’s The Bang Bang Club, based on the true story of four photographers who met and formed a gang of sorts while covering the conflicts in South Africa during the last days of Apartheid, is making its way into American theaters the same week two photojournalists, Chris Hondros and Tim Hetherington (the latter of whom codirected the fine war documentary Restrepo), were killed covering the conflict in Libya.
Unfortunately, Silver’s movie doesn’t cut deep enough: It glosses over some thorny questions and hammers too fixedly on others. It’s not the movie’s job to hand us answers to unanswerable questions. But it ought to do more than float those questions in the form of vague, shaky moral multiple-choice [...]