Zero Dark Thirty Reviews

...a somber, black-winged benediction for what we might count as a lost decade.

Full Review | Original Score: 92/100

Unsettling and unforgettable...challenges the justifications of war's ugly atrocities, without resorting to jingoistic platitudes.

Full Review | Original Score: A-

a brilliant high tech treatment of the subject and the classified nature of the disclosures

Full Review | Original Score: 4.5/5

A film of infectious urgency, questionable accuracy, murky morality and undeniable emotional and intellectual power

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5

Kathryn Bigelow's Zero Dark Thirty is a grueling masterpiece that captures the hunt for bin Laden with a daunting amount of realism and efficiency.

Full Review | Original Score: 4.5/5

The direction by Kathryn Bigelow, who won Oscars for Best Film and Best Director in her previous film "The Hurt Locker," is fierce and focused...

Full Review

Bigelow tells the story very well, very efficiently, but doesn't really say much about it, which is ironic given the response to the film in some quarters.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5

Kathryn Bigelow takes the procedural model and brushes away every unnecessary detail, leaving behind a heavy, blunt object of a film that is also hugely watchable, engrossing and, best of all... highly suspenseful.

Full Review | Original Score: 4.5/5

Bigelow has directed excellent movies before, but this deserves to be remembered as the film that established her as a master.

Full Review | Original Score: 5/5

You can't deny that what Zero Dark Thirty sets out to do, it does excellently.

Full Review | Original Score: 8/10

An exhilarating and compelling historical document worthy of praise.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/4

Bigelow's latest proves a rewarding piece of filmmaking, one that, in its best moments at least, is as gripping and as troubling as anything the director's ever made.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5

Bigelow and screenwriter Mark Boal shape history -- those breaks, big and small, that led to the killing of Osama bin Laden -- into one of the finest fact-based thrillers since "All the President's Men."

Full Review | Original Score: *****

A ripping revenge yarn.

Full Review | Original Score: 5/5

Purely as cinematic exercise, Zero Dark Thirty is an exhilarating piece of work. But, beyond its for-the-times subject matter, the work does not linger whatsoever.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/4

Zero Dark Thirty is interesting as opposed to enjoyable, intriguing as opposed to entertaining, and certainly less memorable than The Hurt Locker.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/5

It's quite remarkable how Bigelow and Boal managed to take 12 years of information (including a conclusion that everyone knows) and packaged it into a coherent, intimate and intense movie.

Full Review | Original Score: 4.5/5

We know the ending, yet remain mesmerized by familiar details, filmed with a harrowing sense of urgency. It's as close to being in the White House situation room that night, watching a closed-circuit broadcast, as anyone could expect.

Full Review | Original Score: A

What's striking is the absence of triumphalism -- Bigelow doesn't shy away from showing the victims shot down in cold blood in the compound -- and we come away with the overwhelming sense that this has been a grim, dark episode in our history.

Full Review

Whereas Locker was less about war than what it is to have a death wish, ZDT is less about the suspenseful true-life search for Osama bin Laden than the red tape one woman must wade through to prove that a mean old bastard is living in suburban Pakistan.

Full Review | Original Score: 3.5/5