In the war on terror, the frontline is everywhere, from Afghanistan to Fiji to Manhattan. And among the U.S.’s most valuable soldier-tacticians are CIA trackers like Maya (Jessica Chastain), a spiritual sister to Claire Danes’ analyst in Homeland and the heroine of this powerhouse docudrama from Kathryn Bigelow and Mark Boal, the director and writer of The Hurt Locker. That Oscar winner showed the war in a microcosm: a three-man unit of bomb defusers in Baghdad. This is a grand macrocosm covering eight years in the search for Osama bin Laden and climaxing in a scrupulous depiction of the SEAL Team 6 raid that killed him. Bigelow turns Boal’s superb reporting of a complex campaign into a lucid, thrilling action movie for the brain. If the U.S. ever had to go to war, you’d want these two to run it.
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