That's a very grudging three stars, because — like Flight — there's more to chew on than I initially realized, but I still think it's kind of a crappy movie. Let me count the ways:

1) The first third in particular wore me down. I exceedingly dislike the way Bigelow transforms 7/7, the 2008 Islamabad Marriott bombing and the bombing of Camp Chapman into standard suspense setpieces (when will that explosive go off?). The latter particularly rubbed the wrong way: the longer Bigelow keeps intercutting between Maya's chat window and the guilelessly optimistic CIA officials awaiting their big break is downright sadistic. (It was just another gchat session UNTIL.) Is there intent here to make the viewer tensely ever-expectant of…

I feel deeply conflicted by this film. While I admire its scope I have great difficulties with the way it presents it, both in content and in cinematic quality.

Let me start by saying that Bigelow should earn nothing but respect for taking on such an ambitious project. I am not a big fan of hers as a director (and she betrays here weaknesses here as well), but I always admire artists who dare to push the boat out a bit further than the rest or take on a challenge with both hands.

Chronicling a decade long man-hunt for the world's public enemy number one is no small task. Mark Boal's script comes across as fastidiously researched, giving us a…

"we don't know what we don't know."
"what the fuck does that mean?"

still perhaps the finest example of the dirty handheld journalistic "realism" as it's not really deployed for its usual mundane purposes but instead serves bigelow's procedural blurring of firsthand details, dates, facts, events, paperwork, screens and timelines into an abstracted foreground of gross jingoistic impulses, poisonous methodology and complete moral erosion. what it gets wrong about the torture/information pipeline doesn't undo how pointedly barbaric and unsatisfying the depiction of american tradecraft is here, especially that raid sequence which is still one of the nastiest pieces of tactical craftsmanship in bigelow's career. the hazy information is being fed, the players are locked in knowingly/willingly or not (reduced to…

CIA/ western propaganda at its finest, yet really entertaining. Although I will say, I haven’t revisited since the release, but I don’t think I realized the self awareness this movie has for itself. They make it a point to state their “interrogation tactics” were beginning to be ridiculed as the years went along and administration charges were made in the White House. This film continues to be seen in new light the more stories and first hand accounts we get from that era. A lot of that doesn’t age well but I don’t think this film glorifies that, rather presents us with what was happening at the time. 

Jessica Chastain is perfectly cast as a Kathryn Bigelow avatar. I imagine…

"Zero Dark Thirty" passes the Bechdel test, which is a measuring tool for whether two women can talk to each other in a film about something other than a man. Jessica (Jennifer Ehle) asks her CIA colleague Maya (Jessica Chastain), strung out from a self-inflicted condition of overworking, if she has taken time away from her obsessive workload to make space for a boyfriend. Maya's closed-off response is a conversation killer. As critic Stephanie Zacharek proposes: ‘Maya has a friendly-prickly competitive relationship with her female coworkers... and barely even entertains the notion of flirting with the guys.’ Here is a woman who wants to discuss the manhunt for Osama bin Laden and only that. While seated in a waiting area,…