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

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

When it comes to establishing and maintaining tension, there wasn't a better American genre picture released this year. Refrain from viewing it as historical record and you won't leave disappointed.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Oct 28, 2019

... it is Chastain's performance, as restrained as it is powerful, that may just be the cherry atop this massive and meticulous film.

| Original Score: A- | Sep 7, 2017

This doesn't zip along in the manner of typical Hollywood entertainment but it's memorable cinema with a finale that will stay with you long after viewing.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Sep 1, 2017

A great American film: complicated, nuanced, searching, piercing, difficult - and yet thrilling and satisfying all the same.

| Jun 21, 2016

Zero Dark Thirty is a magnificent movie, if we ignore the moral ambiguities. But can we?

| Apr 6, 2016

If you like World War II films, you'll enjoy this.

| Jun 13, 2013

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.

| Feb 5, 2013

So overwhelming is the momentum that it proves possible to live with the intelligence that the protagonist is complicit in ground-level fascism.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Jan 25, 2013

Terrifically good, propulsive film-making ...

| Original Score: 4/5 | Jan 25, 2013

We get all imaginable views of the witchy pentacle that is covert US military politics.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Jan 24, 2013

It haunts and lingers long after the lights go up.

| Original Score: 5/5 | Jan 24, 2013

It's an effective thriller - uninterested in anyone other than the home team.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Jan 24, 2013

In Kathryn Bigelow's masterful thriller, the manhunt for Osama bin Laden is the ultimate no-win scenario: a battle neither side can afford to lose with a prize that may not be worth the fight.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Jan 24, 2013

Gripping throughout, with an impressive central performance, this is like a Dogme 95 redo of a Chuck Norris film ...

| Original Score: 5/5 | Jan 21, 2013

This is an instant classic.

| Original Score: 5/5 | Jan 15, 2013

Chastain makes Maya as vivid as a bloodshot eye. Her porcelain skin, delicate features and feminine attire belie the steel within.

| Original Score: 4/4 | Jan 11, 2013

There is admirably little fat on its bones. No love interests, no backstories, no B-plot about Maya's childhood: Zero Dark Thirty is as ruthlessly, relentlessly single-minded as she is about the hunt for bin Laden.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Jan 11, 2013

No doubt Zero Dark Thirty serves a function by airing America's dirty laundry about detainee and torture programs, but in its wake, there's a crying need for a compassionate Coming Home to counter its brutal Deer Hunter.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Jan 11, 2013

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.

| Original Score: C+ | Jan 11, 2013