[Editor's note: This review was written by film critic J.R. Jones for our sister paper the Chicago Reader. You can check out more of Jones' reviews and the rest of the Reader's film coverage here. For more reviews of the biggest movies of the summer, check out CL's Movies & Television site.]
The Hurt Locker, Kathryn Bigelow's white-knuckle drama about a U.S. Army bomb squad in Baghdad, will be the first Iraq war movie to open across America since our forces pulled out of the city. Granted, when Bigelow started shooting the movie in Jordan in July 2007, the surge was still going strong, and when The Hurt Locker premiered in September 2008 at the Venice film festival, the word timetable was still politically radioactive. But when the movie finally arrives in flyover country this month, it will be the first combat drama about Iraq to chronicle a past operation instead of one that's ongoing. Strangely, it will be history.
This article appears in Jul 29 – Aug 4, 2009.