All Critics (211)
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Top Critics (41)
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Fresh (209)
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Rotten (7)
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DVD (17)
One of the best movies of the year, with a star-making performance from Jeremy Renner.
The question isn't how do you live with the buzz of looming death; it's how do you live without it? No answers are offered, or even suggested.
Like her protagonist, Bigelow is both a meticulous technician and a ballsy showoff. And, like him, she has ice water in her veins.
This beyond-the-headlines war movie, a 'ticking clock' thriller from journalist-turned-screenwriter Mark Boal, is the first Iraq War movie to qualify as more first-rate entertainment than sermon.
Bigelow's direction is confident -- the action sequences are tense and suspenseful, so much so that The Hurt Locker also works as a straight-up war film.
The miserably visceral exists here not as exploitation but out of the demands of authenticity.
The suspense may just kill you.
Kathryn Bigelow's The Hurt Locker is one of the most thrilling action films I've seen in the past few years. It features set piece after pulse-quickening set piece.
The decade's best fictional film about its real war, it's a unique perspective on the workplace high of delivering containment from chaos. Some people kick PowerPoint's ass. Sgt. 1st Class William James saves his by defusing bombs.
Jeremy Renner as the unhinged James is a revelation.
There is something original and distinctive about the film's willingness to admit that for some men (and many moviegoers) war carries an intrinsic dramatic charge.
Equal parts bravado-fueled action and pointed political statement. The best film yet made about the Iraq War, and the best American film about war since Platoon.
One of the few must watches of the year so far, and certainly one of the most intelligent offerings, The Hurt Locker would likely already be boasting a masterpiece label had it been from a high profile director or studio.
The opening scene alone may well be the most insanely gripping and amazingly constructed cinematic moment you'll see all year.
Combines white- knuckle tension, sizzling dialogue and poignant insight into the lives of the bravest guys in Baghdad.
A tense, occasionally meandering story about bomb defusers in Iraq.
May be to the War on Terror what Apocalypse Now is to Vietnam, and it's almost as hallucinatory a vision.
While Kathryn Bigelow's taut direction is Academy Award-worthy, Mark Boal's script doesn't get far enough beneath the characters' skin.
Succeeds where so many others have failed, by crafting a compelling Iraq war film.
A must-see film with gripping performances and vivid evocation of urban warfare in Iraq.
With politics and philosophy largely absent from James's tour of extreme duty, it settles into a somewhat comforting pattern of danger and mild relief, which can diffuse the knots in your stomach.
Beautifully shot, well acted, and completely unfocused to the point of, well, what was the point? ... don't be fooled.
The film hurts like hell as we sit on the edge of our seats enveloped in tension
The fact that Bigelow could make such a realistic war movie without the actual combat experience that directors like William Wellman had makes this even more remarkable.
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