Bigelow’s first film in seven years is a visceral, heart-pounding experience, easily the best film yet made about the current war in Iraq and also one of the best war films of the past decade. The film is so tautly constructed in its best moments that it holds you spellbound and very nearly breathless. It gets you ramped up time and time again, yet the film’s real genius is the way it draws you into the world of its characters and holds you there, helping you to understand what otherwise would be inconceivable, which is also what makes it so fundamentally humane, a quintessential trait of great war cinema and one that is too frequently lacking in the bloated excess of the summer movie marketplace. (The Angelika, Dallas, TX)