78
Metascore
10 reviews · Provided by Metacritic.com
- 100San Francisco ChronicleJonathan CurielSan Francisco ChronicleJonathan CurielA riveting works of humanism.
- 90New York Magazine (Vulture)David EdelsteinNew York Magazine (Vulture)David EdelsteinThe film is lyrical, expansive, unbearably beautiful.
- 88Boston GlobeTy BurrBoston GlobeTy BurrSelf-consciously poetic and shot within a luscious inch of its life, the film's also an engrossing heartbreaker: a family saga that spans continents, political administrations, and decades of travail to arrive at a harder, wiser place.
- 80Village VoiceJ. HobermanVillage VoiceJ. HobermanImpressionistic and lyrical, as well as somber and gripping, The Betrayal conveys a ceaseless flow. It's as if the filmmaker has opened a window onto a parallel world traveling beside our own.
- 80SalonAndrew O'HehirSalonAndrew O'HehirMore than anything, The Betrayal is a cinematic essay about family and loss and home, one that's ironic and elegiac in tone and requires some patience.
- 75New York PostV.A. MusettoNew York PostV.A. MusettoA powerful account of how the American dream became a nightmare for one Laotian family.
- 70VarietyScott FoundasVarietyScott FoundasThough an admirable attempt to allow the characters to tell their own story in their own voices, docu may be a bit too freely associative, as it becomes difficult at times to identify individual characters... Picture's second half, which proceeds in a more linear fashion, is resolutely gripping.
- 70The New York TimesA.O. ScottThe New York TimesA.O. ScottThe result is imperfect, but its roughness is entirely consistent with the way the filmmakers understand the traumatic experiences of displacement, loss and deprivation.
- Exploring a Lao family's experience during and since the Vietnam War, the film chronicles the treacheries of geopolitics and the upheaval of exile.
- 67Entertainment WeeklyOwen GleibermanEntertainment WeeklyOwen GleibermanThe past-and-present layering is a lot more resonant -- and less sketchy -- than the film's theme of ''betrayal,'' both familial and governmental.