Avis Metacritic

If this were a fictional Hollywood movie, it would be criticized for being too upbeat. But sometimes truth is not only stranger than fiction, it's also a whole lot better.

Gini Reticker's simply made, affecting documentary Pray the Devil Back to Hell reveals how these heroic ordinary women prodded the factions to peace and literally brought down Taylor, a leader of sociopathic cruelty.

Gini Reticker's lucidly impassioned film, filled with strong, eloquent spokeswomen, garnered Tribeca's docu award.

Without their guns, the men prove surprisingly helpless. And when a representative of a larger pan-African community tells them that if they want the women to stop treating them like children, they must behave responsibly, you sense a corner has been turned.

Powerful enough to make even the most cynical believe in the ability of ordinary people to induce political change.

Gini Reticker's embracing documentary Pray the Devil Back to Hell shows how Taylor got his comeuppance from a coalition of tenacious Christian and Muslim women armed only with matching T-shirts.

Overly conventional as a documentary, but it's inspiring as a rebuttal to the declining state of the world at large. It's encouraging to know that the endurance of institutions like marriage and family could hold the key to keeping civilization intact.

Reticker offers perhaps a too-narrow focus on this historical moment, but Pray the Devil remembers the golden rule of moviemaking--rather than tell, it shows, and what it shows is quietly affecting.

Uplifting, disheartening, inspiring, enraging -- the mind reels while watching the documentary Pray the Devil Back to Hell, even as the eyes water, the temples pound and the body trembles.

"Peace is a process, not an event," one unnamed activist says toward the end. Amen, sister.