A Private War

“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.”