Standard Operating Procedure

Morris is more interested in the pictures she's in than in England herself. He didn't need her in person to make this film. Yet there she is, dragged in to redeem herself so she can be admitted into humankind.

Standard Operating Procedure seeks answers to questions that are usually purely rhetorical: Who would do such a thing to another human being? And why would you want to photograph it?

Morris' manic devotion to detail ultimately does the film in.

A female face: unformed personalities the equivalent of the portrayal of naïveté by Sissy Spacek in "Badlands." An improbable horror movie about metadata and its discontents.

The film's bloody dramatizations...suggest a fundamental distrust of the efficacy of the word over the image and a bland assumption that audiences have lost their ability to empathize.