The Hurt Locker

A very good movie, tied together more or less by a series of sequences. It doesn’t seem to build toward anything -- it’s more of a “day-in-the-life” of an Army road-side bomb diffuser. But the episodes are visceral and suspenseful, the acting is outstanding, and the directing by Kathryn Bigelow is positively triumphant. The filmmakers milk that special kind of bomb-diffusing “cut the red wire or the blue wire” suspense to a sweating-in-your-seat, nail-biting level, all the while barely venturing into the policy-making of the Iraq war. It’s the first of the Iraq war movies of late that I’ve wanted to see and I’m really glad I did. It plays like an action movie, albeit a highly emotional and moving one.