Popular reviews

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  Review by alexandra ★★★★★ 11

  Five stars.

  Fine, four and a half, because I know certainty freaks you guys out, but it's a five.

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  Review by matt lynch ★★★★½

  I mean the movie's entire thesis is that we were thirsty for revenge and we went to extreme lengths to get it. Eventually -- almost accidentally -- we got it. Then that sliver of "justice" irrevocably upended every single value we hold for ourselves, so now what?

  We did this shit, and this is what it means for us.

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  Review by Vadim Rizov ★★★ 23

  That's a very grudging three stars, because — like Flight — there's more to chew on than I initially realized, but I still think it's kind of a crappy movie. Let me count the ways:

  1) The first third in particular wore me down. I exceedingly dislike the way Bigelow transforms 7/7, the 2008 Islamabad Marriott bombing and the bombing of Camp Chapman into standard suspense setpieces (when will that explosive go off?). The latter particularly rubbed the wrong way: the longer Bigelow keeps intercutting between Maya's chat window and the guilelessly optimistic CIA officials awaiting their big break is downright sadistic. (It was just another gchat session UNTIL.) Is there intent here to make the viewer tensely ever-expectant of…

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  Review by aleph beth null ½ 4

  BURT MACKLIN, CIA

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  Review by indi ★★★★

  MS. JESSICA "I'M THE MOTHERFUCKER THAT FOUND THIS PLACE - SIR" CHASTAIN

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  Review by DirkH ★★½ 124

  I feel deeply conflicted by this film. While I admire its scope I have great difficulties with the way it presents it, both in content and in cinematic quality.

  Let me start by saying that Bigelow should earn nothing but respect for taking on such an ambitious project. I am not a big fan of hers as a director (and she betrays here weaknesses here as well), but I always admire artists who dare to push the boat out a bit further than the rest or take on a challenge with both hands.

  Chronicling a decade long man-hunt for the world's public enemy number one is no small task. Mark Boal's script comes across as fastidiously researched, giving us a…

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  Review by josh lewis ★★★★ 1

  "we don't know what we don't know."
  "what the fuck does that mean?"

  still perhaps the finest example of the dirty handheld journalistic "realism" as it's not really deployed for its usual mundane purposes but instead serves bigelow's procedural blurring of firsthand details, dates, facts, events, paperwork, screens and timelines into an abstracted foreground of gross jingoistic impulses, poisonous methodology and complete moral erosion. what it gets wrong about the torture/information pipeline doesn't undo how pointedly barbaric and unsatisfying the depiction of american tradecraft is here, especially that raid sequence which is still one of the nastiest pieces of tactical craftsmanship in bigelow's career. the hazy information is being fed, the players are locked in knowingly/willingly or not (reduced to…

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  Review by Marian ★★ 5

  maybe it's just because we're living in the age of tr*mp now but i'm pretty sure we should just stop making weird nationalistic war movies trying to straddle the fence between palatable war propaganda and political critique anyways this was pretty boring and long but jessica chastain if you're reading this hmu let's go to chilis and make out sometime

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  Review by ryangreen ½ 10

  “Not a single scene is staged. ... Everything is genuine. And there is no tendentious commentary for the simple reason that there is no commentary at all. It is history—pure history.”
  —Leni Riefenstahl, on Triumph of the Will

  "In filming The Birth of a Nation, I gave to my best knowledge the proven facts and presented the known truth about the Reconstruction period in the American South. These facts are based on an overwhelming compilation of authentic evidence and testimony. My picturization of history as it happens requires, therefore, no apology, no defense, no 'explanation.'"
  —D.W. Griffith

  "Those of us who work in the arts know that depiction is not endorsement."
  —Kathryn Bigelow, on Zero Dark Thirty

  "[W]e tortured some…

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  Review by Matthew Christman ★★★★ 5

  I wish I'd been able to see this before "Is it pro-torture or not?" became the only prism for viewing it. I spent most of the run-time evaluating it on that basis, and near the end, I found myself agreeing tepidly with the Greenwaldian critique. But then came the raid sequence. Nasty, brutal, unheroic violence scored to the sound of traumatized, screaming children. All of it topped off by the unanswered and unanswerable question "where do you want to go now?" and Chastain's blank face. Arguing that ZDT "endorses" torture because the film shows waterboarding tangentially relate to capturing bin Laden misses the point by light-years. For one thing, torture is wrong WHETHER IT "WORKS" OR NOT. Secondly, ZDT's joyless…

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  Review by mia 🦇 5

  jessica chastain can yell at me anytime she wants

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  Review by Reece ★★★★ 2

  jessica chastain should simply be in every movie… i feel like that would solve most of the problems I have with modern cinema