A Mighty Heart: Critic Reviews

The twisting of narrative perspective that pushes the missing man's wife so insistently into the foreground makes A Mighty Heart a mighty challenge.

Effectively fashioned, as jolting as it is polished, as well as a surprising, insistently political work of commercial art.

For all its kinetic energy and sweep, Michael Winterbottom's hyperactive new film is really nothing more than a very, very classy TV movie.

Emotionally and viscerally compelling and retains a suspenseful, edge-of-the-seat quality.

A taut, meticulously crafted police procedural. Part thriller, part melodrama, A Mighty Heart recalls last year's United 93 in its technical prowess and artistry, and in its harrowing emotional arc.

The problem with structuring A Mighty Heart as a suspense film is obvious: We already know the outcome.

There's hardly a moment when Jolie is on-screen that you can't sense the presence of make-up artists and hair stylists hovering anxiously just off frame.

Though the events recalled in Winterbottom's riveting docudrama A Mighty Heart are well-known, they are dramatized with such realistic detail and heartfelt passion that the story feels as urgent as the latest bad news out of the Middle East.

The immediacy of the setting, heightened by documentary techniques, makes this a chastening film, a portrait of the explosive new world in which we live.

A movie that captures the frustration of not knowing, the unconsummated urge to comprehend.

He [Winterbottom] approaches his subjects as very, very real, not just fodder for topical films.

Director Michael Winterbottom's film of Mariane Pearl's book constantly reaches for the authentic with subtle tenacity.

A Mighty Heart is clipped, blunt, and grimly realistic.

The movie, directed by Michael Winterbottom, lies about as far from the trials of Lara Croft as is cinematically possible.

What 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 worthy film on a great, tragic subject.

This docudrama manages to be gripping even though the outcome is no mystery.

To experience the grief of a death, one must know something of the life, no? That's the assumption of a movie like Silkwood. It is not assumed in A Mighty Heart, which tells us precious little about Mariane and Danny

British director Michael Winterbottom tells the story with an intelligence and restraint worthy of the subject.

Should end up one of the year's best dramas, an intricate, jolting look at life out of control and one woman's fight to hold onto her dignity and love in the midst of unimaginable tragedy. It's not an easy story to watch. Imagine living it.

The only drama comes in the waiting, which eventually becomes tiresome.

All too often, the point of the story collapses under the weight of [director Winterbottom's] political priorities. He's a prolific Don Quixote, committed to tilting cinematic windmills, but he goes about the job clumsily.

The sad saga of slain Wall Street Journal reporter Danny Pearl has made it to the bigscreen with facts, figures and beating heart intact in A Mighty Heart.

[Jolie is] greatly abetted by the no-nonsense, very un-Hollywood-ish approach that British director Michael Winterbottom takes to this fact-based thriller.

Jolie lets us understand Mariane, and Winterbottom's film puts the viewer in her shoes.