Entertaining, challenging, innovative, stunning.

Rating: 9/10 (24 September 2005)

The Lord of War is the best film I've seen this year. It is essential to see this film if you have an interest in the political realities of this world. As such it is factually and visually educational. It is also a suspenseful adventure film, a horror movie with relatively little blood, a psychological study and a debate on ethics. There are a couple of sequences with amazingly inventive visual techniques. Production values are elaborate and flawless. It is well paced; never flat for me. Even if you know the full story it is suspenseful, dialogue is witty, some brilliant. This is a subject that has never been dramatized. The finale factoids blew me away. As such The Lord of War can be compared to and said to have as much impact as a Michael Moore film. The films are not comparable in any other way as Moore's film is pseudo documentary while The Lord of War focuses on the entertaining story of family relationships and interplay of interesting actual characters. Yet beyond the fiction, I felt the story essence is utterly true. After the movie ended I sat stunned at this portrait of the forces governing the world in which we live.