Zero Dark Thirty Reviews

With a protagonist you lack the desire to root for and subject matter that's been shoved down our throats in the 11 years since 9/11, This is one of the only films this year where battling heavy eyelids is more exciting than the film itself.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/10

This isn't a bad movie, it's just too easy. This is a movie for people who want to eat their fish without having to gut it first.

Full Review | Original Score: B-

I was pretty upset that Bigelow got snubbed by the Academy.... until I actually SAW the film. It felt like a really good TV movie, but Jessica Chastain's phony and forced performance drags it down.

Full Review | Original Score: 2/4

Bigelow isn't trying to entertain the audience, but I'm not sure what she wants us to take from the film as the end credits start.

Full Review | Original Score: 5/10

There's an emotional detachment to the film that undercuts its potency. Zero Dark Thirty is more technically proficient than emotionally involving.

Full Review | Original Score: 2.5/4

A clinical, single-minded revenge film that prioritizes technique over morality in the war on terrorism.

Full Review | Original Score: 1/5

After the lengthy torture scenes, procedural repetition takes over until the murkily-filmed Seal Team 6 raid. But Jessica Chastain is quite convincing as a CIA operative dedicated to her job.

Full Review

Rotten Tomatoes notes that I agree with Tomatometer critics 80 percent of the time, but this is one of those times I have to part ways with them.

Full Review | Original Score: 6/10

While "Zero Dark Thirty" may offer political and moral arguing points aplenty, as well as vicarious thrills,as a film it's simply too much of a passable thing.

Full Review | Original Score: C+

The second half of the film IS the film.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/5

By most cinematic measures, Zero Dark Thirty is one of the best-made films of 2012. It also probably shouldn't exist. [Blu-ray]

Full Review | Original Score: 2.5/4

The decision one has to make is whether it's worth sitting through the first two hours, that provide a fine antidote for insomnia, to see the final 37 minutes.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/10

Bigelow has hamstrung herself by not committing to a viewpoint. This is a by the numbers, cold, emotionally inert, just the "facts" procedural drama that is just barely a step above an episode of Law & Order.

Full Review | Original Score: C-

Indulges Cheneyian fantasies complete with the bad-movie scene of the prisoner's defiance: "You're just a garbage man in the corporation," shouts the Arab who needs a lesson in manners from the Ph.D. (in torture?) who is racking him.

Full Review | Original Score: 2/5

By showing scenes of torture without taking any kind of moral (as opposed to tactical) stand on what we are seeing, Bigelow has made an amoral movie -- which is, I would argue, an unconscionable approach to this material.

Full Review | Original Score: C+

Movies must move, and this one just lies there like a stack of paper from a classified government filing cabinet.

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A silly, at times despicable film that never remotely deserved an Oscar nomination. Compared with this, Team America: World Police was a think piece.

Full Review | Original Score: 1/5

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: *****

The controversy comes from insistence by Bigalow that audiences think for themselves. She neither condones nor condemns, but rather asks questions without giving easy answers. Plus, she does it while thoroughly entertaining the audience.

Full Review

Bigelow and Boal are not in the business of providing easy answers. But they are trying to turn out a gripping, tense, political thriller. And this one is a masterpiece.

Full Review | Original Score: 5/5