I also don't know how well this 2001 drama represents the events of October 3 and 4, 1993, though I can see that it represents them in a realist vein, referring to other war movies without becoming frivolous.

| Nov 8, 2011

Black Hawk Down makes that point without preachment, in precise and pitiless imagery. And for that reason alone it takes its place on the very short list of the unforgettable movies about war and its ineradicable and immeasurable costs.

| Nov 8, 2011

A relentless immersion in combat strikingly realized but none too pleasurable to sit through.

Full Review | Jan 2, 2009

Ambitious, sumptuously-framed and frenetic, Black Hawk Down occasionally errs on the confused, but is nonetheless a rare find of a war movie which dares to turn genre convention on its head.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Dec 30, 2006

[Scott] does a reasonable job sketching the complicated and contradictory political context, but attempts to bring in the odd Somali perspective are grossly inadequate.

| Jun 24, 2006

Has the pointless verisimilitude of an expensively rendered computer simulation.

Full Review | Oct 19, 2003

A first-rate war movie that presents its subject so horrifyingly well that it doesn't need to probe or preach.

Full Review | Jul 20, 2002

What is it that a film like this offers us in times like these? Understanding? Catharsis? Perspective? The words seem irrelevant.

| Original Score: A- | May 9, 2002

A biased historical reconstruction of extreme physical peril.

| Feb 5, 2002

One of the best depictions of the outright lunacy inherent to battle I have ever seen.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Jan 27, 2002

[D]efinitely worth seeing for those amazing battle sequences.

Full Review | Jan 24, 2002

The next worst thing to being there. That's how real it feels.

| Original Score: 4.5/5 | Jan 22, 2002

It represents a particularly limiting application of hard-bitten manly values to experiences that can't help but transcend them.

Full Review | Jan 22, 2002

In Gladiator and Hannibal, Ridley Scott gave us shrewd, witty entertainments; this is macho obtuse posturing, puffed up with ersatz valour.

| Jan 22, 2002

Black Hawk Down superbly visualizes journalist-author Mark Bowden's bestselling 'tale of modern war,' detailing a U.S. military misadventure in the Somalia of 1993.

| Jan 18, 2002

A good, intense war movie that falls short of being a great one: Once the adrenaline wears off, you realize it's as dramatically satisfying as an MRE food ration.

| Jan 18, 2002

I can think of no other instance when a country at war has presented on its movie theater screens such an excruciating account of battle, or such a sobering one.

| Original Score: 4/4 | Jan 18, 2002

Black Hawk Down has a relentless force that makes character development almost beside the point.

Full Review | Jan 18, 2002

Black Hawk Down is all dazzling craft and no redeeming art; it's simultaneously a superb piece of filmmaking and a highly suspect film.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Jan 18, 2002

Black Hawk Down sends you away impressed, properly horrified and then thoughtful about the lessons ignored from the battle it exhaustively describes.

Full Review | Original Score: 2/4 | Jan 18, 2002