...at the film’s most climatic scene, you’ll forget you’re even watching a movie.

| Dec 9, 2024

Zero Dark Thirty suffers from a story that’s a bit too long, scattered, and cold … but that also works in its favor, because it makes you feel how maddeningly long, scattered, and cold the near-decade-long search for bin Laden must have been.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Dec 8, 2024

Kathryn Bigelow and Mark Boal may have meant well but make no mistake that Zero Dark Thirty cannot be viewed in the same light after the torture report's release in 2014.

| Original Score: 3.5/5 | Dec 19, 2022

From its audio-led touching on the events of September 11 to Alexandre Desplat's understated, but evocative and effective score, Zero Dark also impresses aurally...

| Original Score: 4.5/5 | Oct 7, 2022

Without resorting to polarizing tactics such as overt theatrics or cold documentary reenactment, it represents a clever balance of emotion and catharsis.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Sep 20, 2022

It’s a movie that’s not afraid of asking tough questions or of challenging popular sentiments. It’s also a movie made with impeccable filmmaking style and skill which all comes back to Bigelow.

| Original Score: 4.5/5 | Aug 20, 2022

Exhaustive, implacable, rigorous, stripped of any tear-jerking [scenes]. Allowing the audience to judge the scale of values put forth. [Full review in Spanish]

| Original Score: 4/5 | Jun 28, 2022

Bigelow's film lets viewers decide on their own if the pain, suffering, and carnage were justifiable for the chance to say mission accomplished in 2011.

| Original Score: 8/10 | Jun 21, 2022

Kathryn Bigelow's tense thriller is worth seeing again just to be reminded how brilliant Chastain is in this role of single-minded operative.

| Oct 5, 2021

What stands out most (in addition to Jessica Chastain's brilliant performance) is the portrait of the normally mildly maligned (also often portrayed as supremely sneaky and up to no good) CIA-as a bastion of patriotism.

| Original Score: 4.5/5 | Jun 12, 2021

With its course of realism over romanticism, "Zero Dark Thirty" offers no slice-of-life, next-door-neighbor stories of Americana.

| Original Score: 5/5 | Apr 12, 2021

As was the case with The Hurt Locker (2008), where the central figures were US soldiers in Iraq, Bigelow concentrates in her latest work on how exhausting and difficult it is to be a victimizer.

| Feb 12, 2021

A superbly edge-of-your-seat experience, perfectly riddled with unshielded and realistic violence and an enthralling hunt for evidence.

| Original Score: 9/10 | Dec 2, 2020

Kathryn Bigelow's expansive drama follows the decade-long international manhunt for Osama bin Laden, from the events of 9/11 to his eventual death at the hands of US Marines.

| Oct 27, 2020

It very likely says quite a bit about Kathryn Bigelow's Zero Dark Thirty that the CIA has felt compelled to publicly disparage the film's accuracy.

| Original Score: 3.5/4.0 | Sep 27, 2020

[T]he mix of technical mastery and conscious hollowness that left such a deep impression on me.

| Jul 1, 2020

Is a very intense dramatic thriller that can be classified as one of the best of its genre. [Full review in Spanish]

| Original Score: 8/10 | Jun 25, 2020

[Zero Dark Thirty] is one of the great cinematic procedurals ever made.

| Original Score: 4/4 | Apr 26, 2020

Jessica Chastain acts the hell out of an epic role based on the real woman who tracked down Osama bin Laden ...

| Original Score: 8/10 | Dec 30, 2019

[Kathryn] Bigelow and [Mark] Boal have done it again. A film destined to become as much a part of the fabric of America as the hunt for Osama bin Laden itself...

| Nov 27, 2019