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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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75The film is fascinating and at times disturbing, but Winterbottom's arms-length style mutes any emotional impact.
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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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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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67Despite the best of intentions, an actress who makes her own headlines gets in the way of the big picture.
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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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63I almost wish A Mighty Heart were about the Captain, and I'd bet director Michael Winterbottom does, too. The character contains all the contradictory impulses of this region of the world that the West tries and miserably fails to boil down to black and white.
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90Moving and frighteningly real.
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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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88Emotionally and viscerally compelling and retains a suspenseful, edge-of-the-seat quality.
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70Functions primarily as a suspense film, and it manages to be gripping even though the outcome is already known.
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63The overriding tone of A Mighty Heart is neither indignant nor sentimental: The film is consistently cool, almost to a fault.
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75The story feels as urgent as the latest bad news out of the Middle East.
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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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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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100Stunning.
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75Jolie simply exercises Mariane's persistent will, and honors her in the process.
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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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75A worthy film on a great, tragic subject.
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63For the most part, Michael Winterbottom's well-intended film, the true story of an idealistic journalist and his gallant wife disinvites emotion by focusing on process at the expense of passion.
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83Visceral, alive and very scary.
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58A Mighty Heart has the surface tension of a first-rate docudrama but neither the passion nor the vision to encompass its powerhouse subject.
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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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70A taut, meticulously crafted police procedural.
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50Angelina Jolie is the major alienation effect in A Mighty Heart, although she's not the only one. The hectic pizzazz with which hired gun Michael Winterbottom directs this tale of terrifying terrorism is another distraction.
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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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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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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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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.
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