Venice and Toronto. The Hurt Locker.

"The Iraq war, which dominated last year's Venice in films such as Redacted and In the Valley of Elah, returned in the most anticipated of the last films shown this year," writes Nick James in the Observer.

"But Kathryn Bigelow's The Hurt Locker, a taut, intimate war movie about a three-man bomb disposal squad, was not enough to redeem this weak festival. Despite a 'war is hell' gloss and terrific street atmosphere built by really excellent acting, camerawork and editing, it could pass for propaganda."

But for Time's Richard Corliss, "The Hurt Locker is a near-perfect movie about men in war, men at work. Through sturdy imagery and violent action, it says that even Hell needs heroes." Bigelow "has paraded her adroitness with complex stories about oddball characters in two curious subgenres: Near Dark (1987) was the all-time teenage vampire love story, Point Break (1991) the all-time surfer-heist movie. The scriptwriter, Marc Boal, is a journalist for Rolling Stone, the Village Voice and Playboy, which ran a story that Paul Haggis expanded into the sharpest of last year's Iraq-related dramas, In the Valley of Elah. These two filmmakers have pooled their complementary talents to make one of the rare war movies that's strong but not shrill, and sympathetic to guys doing an impossible job.

"Just when you think the battle of Iraq war dramas has been fought and lost, along comes one that demands to be seen - if you can handle the raging adrenaline," writes Peter Howell in the Toronto Star.

"Often gripping at a straight thriller level, but increasingly weakened by its fuzzy (and hardly original) psychology, Kathryn Bigelow's The Hurt Locker, centered on an elite US bomb squad in Baghdad, doesn't bring anything new to the table of grunts-in-the-firing-line movies," writes Derek Elley in Variety.

For the Los Angeles Times, Mark Olsen talks with both director and screenwriter. Boal: "The most important distinction that was in our minds is that none of the [Iraq war] movies that have come out so far, or were in development when we were in development, were combat movies. They were all either political polemic, or they were home-front, domestic dramas. And we felt what distinguished us was nobody was really doing the in-the-trenches, soldier's-point-of-view kind of classic war film. To me, that's a big point of difference."

Update, 9/10: Scott Foundas: "Bigelow's film may not be, in formal terms, as radical and innovative a work as Brian De Palma's Redacted, but it's nevertheless a unique and worthy addition to the canon of cinematic texts about the Iraq campaign - the first, I think, that really tries to understand what motivates the men (and in Bigelow's army, there are only men) who join a volunteer military in times of war. It also happens to be a first-class piece of visceral action moviemaking."

Update, 9/12: Online viewing tip. Anne Thompson talks with Bigelow.

Update, 9/13: "As in HBO's recent mini-series Generation Kill, the focus in The Hurt Locker is hard-earned, strict military realism, in terms of both style and the candid, straightforward, episodic narrative," writes Daniel Kasman in the Auteurs' Notebook. "Anything outside the professional activity of these three men pales in meaning and, sadly for the film, in conceptualization and execution, when compared to the swift, expert evocation of their turbulent, highly exposed, and tightly team-reliant action in the field."

James Rocchi, writing at Cinematical, finds it "an assured, confident, swaggering piece of moviemaking that manages to not only evoke every war of the 20th century but also, despite the claims by makers and some reviewers that it's an 'apolitical' film, speaks very specifically to the Iraq war."

Update, 9/17: Kevin Kelly talks with Bigelow for the SpoutBlog.

Posted by dwhudson at September 9, 2008 7:08 AM