City of Ghosts (2017) (2024)

Popular reviews

• Review by davidehrlich ★★★½

  Evil spreads faster than justice — that’s one of the things that makes it so sinister. It’s hard to contain, it’s always on the offensive, and it isn’t bound by the tactfulness of the truth. Love must be fought for, hate needs only to be permitted. There’s a lot to sort through in Matt Heineman’s profoundly harrowing “City of Ghosts,” the latest in a long line of recent documentaries about the atrocities that are being committed in Syria, but that grim dichotomy emerges from the chaos intact and more striking than ever. Almost everything else is lost in the rubble, sacrificed at the altar of a film whose horrors are so upsetting that they ultimately represent little more than their own madness.

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• Review by Sam 🎞🏴‍☠️ ★★★★½ 1

  Phenomenal documentary about absolutely outstanding and exceptional people.

  I very much recommend everyone!

  (Also, just to add some context, far right extremists are not only a problem in Germany, in many other European countries too)

• Review by Badboy ★★★★½

  “The lesson we learned in Raqqa is that when one group falls, another will rise in its place.”

  A documentary that tracks the members of the "Raqqa is being slaughtered in silence" movement, which greatly contributed to showing the crimes of ISIS to the world.

  The film shows us the amount of great pressure exerted on them and the amount of fear that has persisted and haunted them to this day.

  Watching this kind of documentaries always makes my mind expand but at the same time I keep realizing that the worst horrors happen every day in parts of the world.

  Seeing someone suffer for losing loved ones or seeing someone fight to save their nation, trying to expose things so that the people wake up, trying to make the world find out is something admirable about this documentary.

• Review by James ★★★★

  We've all seen the news and have a vague idea of the horrors occurring in Syria. City of Ghosts puts those atrocities into perspective, thanks to those risking their lives in Raqqa to capture footage and send messages to the diaspora of refugees in communication with them, who then tell the world.

  Possibly the most important documentary film of the year and very difficult to watch, though it wisely inter-cuts the violence and heartbreak with uplifting scenes of those who escaped getting on with everyday life in their new home countries.

• Review by aiman

  “A camera is more powerful than a weapon”

• Review by Darren Carver-Balsiger ★★★★

  A significant documentary about the heroes revealing the truth about ISIS. It's tough to watch, but it's a necessary work which covers ISIS's media war and the power of civilian journalism. City of Ghosts is timely and powerful, revealing itself to be an important and brave film.

  2017 Ranked

• Review by Thomas ★★★★ 5

  Kind of offended by the fact that Last Men in Aleppo got nominated for Best Documentary Feature, but not this.

• Review by Hicham Lamalem ★★★★ 1

  وثائقي يتتبع أعضاء حركة: الرقة تُذبح في صمت، التي ساهمت بشكل كبير في إظهار جرائم داعش للعالم.. يرينا الفيلم كمية الضغط الكبير الذي مورس عليهم وكمية الخوف الذي لازمهم ويلازمهم حتى اليوم.. مهما حاولت لن أجد كلمات أصف بها وحشية تنظيم داعش.

• Review by MissHellBlazer ★★★★½

  So emotionally heavy. What a great film. I kind of knew what ISIS did but I never knew to what extent. I was trembling with sadness and fury by the end. I hope ISIS burns in Hell for the pain they have caused.

• Review by The Kino Man ★★★★ 1

  I watched on accident because I thought it was one of the Best Documentary nominees, but apparently it’s not, even though it probably should be.

• Review by Bea #ReleaseCoyoteVsAcme ★★★★

  It was the scene when the younger man was speaking, after watching his father being executed in a slickly-edited propaganda video on the internet. He talks about his father being killed, and his older brother being executed shortly afterwards. He promises that they won't be forgotten, barely keeping his emotions in check.

  That's the scene where it hit me that all these men working as covert journalists in the ISIS capital... they're all my age. They're just kids, basically, thrown into endless war by an autocratic regime holding onto power and fundamentalist crusaders aimed at bringing about the apocalypse. They're just kids forced to flee their home amidst assassinations and complete media isolation, desperately trying to bring attention to the…

• Review by Raul Marques ★★★★

  Almost as good as it is important. The danger of banally over-utilizing terms like 'brave' or 'strong', even if with nothing but good intentions, is that when they're employed in an extremely legitimate context like this one, they inevitably lose some of their weight. Another one of those docs that (much like real life) is primarily bleak and poignantly ruthless until it decides to leave on a hopeful note, which understandably doesn't seem as nearly convincing as the overwhelmingly harsh reality that preceded it.