The Hurt Locker

... An unflinching look at the personal cost of being really good at a really tough job.

The Hurt Locker is without a doubt one of the best war pictures I have ever seen, and I have seen most of them.

I probably should have seen this movie when I had the chance in theaters, but as a DVD it didn't live up to the hype, though it was well done.

More than anything, The Hurt Locker is a high-wire study of men at work, its lack of overt politics replaced by a revelatory central performance.

There is much that is fiercely modest about its ambitions. And, for a war film, it is often disconcertingly quiet.

An important, intense, nail-biting experience -- really quite unforgettable.

War movies like The Hurt Locker show us that Americans are the nuanced protagonists of our own stories, even if those stories occur on other people’s land, in other people’s homes, with other people as the main casualties.

More enduring than your typical war movie, Bigelow has constructed a suspenseful and confident motion picture about addiction, filled with biting observations about why some go to war, and then why some stay.

Evocative and unsettling, The Hurt Locker remains an outstanding and cautionary war drama.

Never does Bigelow falter in her direction, which, by adroitly alternating between muscular and sensitive, reapplies a recognizable face to a conflict that has largely slipped from the American public conscious with all the wispiness of a bad dream.