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100Of all the feature films and documentaries to emerge since 9/11, few have been as bold, perceptive or as downright chilling as this thriller.
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91An utterly convincing portrait of the sort of person willing to strap ordnance to himself and decimate scores of strangers in pursuit of his religious and political ideals.
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One of the strongest--and sure to be controversial--films of the year, The War Within goes places that other films wouldn't dare go.
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80A few plot details strain credibility, but the characters (particularly the friend's sister and little boy) are persuasively depicted.
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78It's thanks to Akhtar's standout performance that The War Within is as electrifying as it is.
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75What goes on inside the mind of a terrorist who is willing to blow himself for the cause? The War Within is one of the few films that attempts to deal with this subject in a nonexploitative way.
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75The film is highly critical of America's counterterrorist efforts, and not at all subtle in making the point that our stupidity and Nazi-like methods have helped create -- and vastly acerbate -- our problems.
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70Not entirely free from an aura of didacticism or contrivance, but the film by and large functions as a taut thriller. A drastic act late in the film on the part of Duri seems somewhat implausible, but that does not deter The War Within from emerging as a mostly well-wrought and timely tragedy.
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70A portrait of a mild-mannered zealot, one that seeps under the skin and unsettles the nerves.
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67The War Within plays effectively off our voyeurism, yet it has such a cloistered, American-eyed view of the nightmare of terrorism that I kept searching for the profound explanation beneath its piecemeal ones.
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63The War Within is dark and somber, adjectives that describe both the film's look and its message.
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63Hampered by a mopey leading man.
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60Sometimes too pat and sometimes ragged with omissions and confusions, but it's still a fascinating look outside of that familiar world and into a harsher one.
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60The War Within succeeds only as a thriller with some wartime overtones, rather than as a character study that thrills.
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The War Within has within it a war of its own, one between docudramatic truth and familiar melodrama, however low-keyed.
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50Despite an admirable effort to explore topical concerns, both director and actor are obviously overwhelmed by the immensity of the subject matter.
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Chillingly realistic but deeply repellent, The War Within is a film that should not have been made.
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50Tries too hard to be even-handed.
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Does a fairly good job of laying out the basic political motives behind Islamic terrorism. Unfortunately, as a drama, it has its narrative peak in the middle and quickly runs out of story afterward.
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40Mired in noir cliché, the movie manages to be simultaneously overwrought and undercooked, with the Bambi-eyed Akhtar giving such a relentlessly inscrutable performance, one wants to poke him with a stick.
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40Shot in DV by Lisa Rinzler, Joseph Castelo's modest drama struggles for verisimilitude, but it wears clichés like concrete boots, down to the cycle-of-intolerance-and-violence message that we hear every day on NPR.
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40An honorable but failed attempt to dramatize the dynamics that propel a basically good man to become a suicide bomber, The War Within contains provocative points inside a dull package.
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ChadS.8
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GerryB.9
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judeha9The best movie i seen this year.