Review Roundup: Kathryn Bigelow's ZERO DARK THIRTY

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ZERO DARK THIRTY has opened in select theaters in New York and Los Angeles and is set for wide release in January. The action thriller is the story of history's greatest manhunt for the world's most dangerous man. It follows the special operations forces mission to capture or kill Osama bin Laden.

Directed and co-produced by Kathryn Bigelow with a screenplay by Mark Boal, both associated with The Hurt Locker, the film stars Oscar nominee Jessica Chastain, Chris Pratt, James Gandolfini, Joel Edgerton, EdgaR Ramirez, and Mark Strong.

Let's see what the critics had to say:

Richard Corliss, TIME MAGAZINE: First and last, Zero Dark Thirty is a movie, and a damned fine one. Like Argo — which, with all due respect to director Ben Affleck and the film’s many admirers, ZDT blows out of the water — it dramatizes a true-life international adventure with CIA agents as the heroes. (And it takes fewer fictional liberties with the source material than Affleck did.) In the tradition of Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood and Tom Wolfe’s The Right Stuff, Boal tracked down the particulars of a sensational exploit and, skipping the “non-fiction novel” stage, created an original screenplay that provides a streamlined timeline of the hunt for bin Laden.

Todd McCarthy, The Hollywood Reporter: Whether you call it well informed speculative history, docu-drama recreation or very stripped down suspense filmmaking, Zero Dark Thirty matches form and content to pretty terrific ends. A long-arc account of the search for Osama Bin Laden seen from the perspective of an almost insanely focused female CIA officer who never gives up the hunt until the prey ends up in a body bag, Kathryn Bigelow's and Mark Boal's heavily researched successor to The Hurt Locker will be tough for some viewers to take, not only for its early scenes of torture, including water boarding, but due to its denial of conventional emotionalism and non-gung ho approach to cathartic revenge-taking.

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