A Private War
Directed by Matthew Heineman
“Marie Colvin is exactly the kind of swaggering, larger-thanlife figure biopic dreams are made of,” said Leah Greenblatt in Entertainment Weekly. The American war correspondent— who lost an eye covering the Tamil Tigers in Sri Lanka and who died in Syria during a 2012 bombardment—repeatedly risked her life to give voice to the voiceless. Here, Rosamund Pike savors the meaty role of the hard-drinking Sunday Times writer, a woman who insisted on wearing La Perla lingerie beneath her combat-zone khakis. The actress “can’t quite shake her English-rose delicacy,” but in dramatizing the traumas that Colvin took home,
A Private War “works hard to be the public reckoning her work deserves.” The supporting cast includes Jamie Dornan as photojournalist Paul Conroy and Stanley Tucci as a love interest who’s bewildered by Colvin’s passion, said Joe Morgenstern in The Wall Street Journal. Unfortunately, “some of the dramatic writing is clumsily formulaic.” Still, “this restive, raw movie slowly accumulates the heft to render its flaws irrelevant,” said Jeannette Catsoulis in The New York Times. As one war zone blurs into another, each chaotic scene imparts a little of the heroine’s PTSD. “The real Colvin would have probably approved.”