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100The title comes from the memoir by Mariane Pearl, wife of kidnapped Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl. It applies equally to Winterbottom, who has made the rarest movie among this summer's releases: a taut police procedural that examines all sides of an issue and forces us to re-think our own.
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100Stunning.
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90Moving and frighteningly real.
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88The film belongs to Jolie. She won an Oscar for 1999's "Girl, Interrupted," but this is by far her best performance.
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88What is best about A Mighty Heart is that it doesn't reduce the Daniel Pearl story to a plot, but elevates it to a tragedy. A tragedy that illuminates and grieves for the hatred that runs loose in our world, hatred as a mad dog that attacks everyone. Attacks them for what seems, to the dog, the best of reasons.
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88Though absurdly criticized for being too "white" to play Mariane Pearl, Jolie gives an excellent performance. She portrays Mariane as gutsy, smart, passionate and highly efficient.
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88Emotionally and viscerally compelling and retains a suspenseful, edge-of-the-seat quality.
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88The film takes its cue from the widow, neither sermonizing or even villainizing, content to serve quietly as an admirable exercise in restraint and a moving example of the grace under pressure that is the essence of courage.
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83The most striking thing about it is what it's not...a richly atmospheric film that races surefootedly through complexities of data and emotion like a spy movie and not at all like a sentimental sob story.
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83Visceral, alive and very scary.
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80Expertly fashioned documentary-style drama.
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80That sense of one small, private world shattering within the larger and even more unstable one around it is the essence of Michael Winterbottom's unmooring, bleakly beautiful film version of A Mighty Heart.
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80Michael Winterbottom has made an enormously moving document of the tense days between Pearl's capture and the news that he was dead.
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80Effectively fashioned, as jolting as it is polished, as well as a surprising, insistently political work of commercial art.
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80The film's point of view is inevitably that of an outsider, which Danny Pearl was, and menace is the essence of this shattering story, which has been told with skill and urgent conviction. A Mighty Heart makes the terms of the terrorist threat palpable.
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75A worthy film on a great, tragic subject.
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75The story feels as urgent as the latest bad news out of the Middle East.
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75Remarkably apolitical, considering that it comes from the director of the Bush-bashing "The Road to Guantanamo."
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75Heart-wrenching film.
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75The film is fascinating and at times disturbing, but Winterbottom's arms-length style mutes any emotional impact.
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75What does not work, in a movie where almost everything, including dramatic rhetoric, has been kept on a modest scale up to this point, is the heavy-handed way Winterbottom (and Jolie) contrast the pain of loss with the pain of begetting toward the end.
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75Jolie simply exercises Mariane's persistent will, and honors her in the process.
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70The movie is clipped, blunt, and grimly realistic. It is practically a POLICIER , although the suspense is mitigated by our knowledge that the investigation will end badly.
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70Like many of Winterbottom's movies, it falls a step short of its full potential. Its tact is both its strength and its weakness. The climax feels rushed: it's the rare movie these days that feels too short.
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70This is one of those roles where casting can't help but trump acting. Like Elizabeth Taylor as Cleopatra, Angelina Jolie IS Mariane Pearl--and that marquee-size "is" gets in the way, not of her performance, but of our ability to suspend disbelief and watch it.
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70This movie does not fully separate itself from our admittedly low -- even slightly shameful -- expectations, does not become the pure documentary it might perhaps better have been.
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70In his first studio venture, Michael Winterbottom coaxes forth a staggering wealth of detail from this terse, methodical account of Pearl's kidnapping and murder in Pakistan.
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70A taut, meticulously crafted police procedural.
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70The result, like many of Winterbottom's films, lies an inch short of disarray; we CAN keep pace with the investigation, but only just, and that sense of splintering honors the unpredictability of the setting.
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70Functions primarily as a suspense film, and it manages to be gripping even though the outcome is already known.
User score distribution:
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Positive: 11 out of 15
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Mixed: 2 out of 15
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Negative: 2 out of 15
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DanielN.10One of a kind. One of the most important films this year and every American should see it. Jolie at her very best. Give her the Oscar now.
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DarleneG.10Angelina Jolie - amazing woman, amazing actress, amazing heart. Great performance worthy of an Oscar.
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JaredC0