The level of access that A Thousand Cuts gets to both the side of the press and of the administration is ultimately what makes it valuable. By being on the ground with journalists doing honest-to-goodness hard work, the film reframes Duterte's war on drugs (really a campaign to terrorize the poor into submission) as an information war between news outlets and government propaganda. Unfortunately, in the process, the film also winds up excluding the voices of working class people and how they both engage and are engaged by all this information. There should be a way to honor the work of these journalists without accidentally positioning them above the public they serve.

For those living in the Philippines, A Thousand Cuts really doesn't present anything that most people don't already know—save for some unexpectedly humanizing moments with one of the country's most notorious pro-administration propagandists. If people weren't suspicious of her behavior already, she all but confirms that who she is on stage and in her propaganda videos is essentially an act. Even more bafflingly, she reveals her motivations to be rooted in her family's own tragic connections to the drug war, which you'd think would make her pick the side of the oppressed. She emerges as a far more interesting character than she has any right to be.