An American soldier struggles with an ethical dilemma when he becomes involved with a widow of a fallen officer.
Meandering when it should be focused, this meditation on ethics and grief never really fulfils its early promise.
It's a tough job but someone's got to do it in a moving look at one of the armed forces' most harrowing details. Harrelson's 2010 Oscar nod was well earned.
Intimate, powerful filmmaking.
A worthy addition to the canon of Iraq war films, The Messenger has a gentle humanity that creeps under your skin. Look out for a terrific Harrelson turn, too.
The Messenger is a film of quietly assured dramatic clout, a strong and sober reckoning with American conscience.
Stumbles a little, loosening its grip in the bromantic final stretch. But if impenitent heartstring pluckage is what you’re after, this is where it’s at.
An intelligent and well-acted film which deserves its outing here.
The whole is slightly too unfocussed to be completely satisfying.
There are moving performances from all concerned, with Harrelson on terrific form as the hard nut with a soft centre, but the subject matter naturally makes for some harrowing viewing at times.
It will rate among the most sharply written and best-acted movies of the year.
Someone has taken a great idea and botched it in the execution.
The film carefully builds to a cathartic ending and delivers an absorbing portrait of the need for human interaction.
It's a rewarding, humane picture.
Foster and an Oscar-nominated Harrelson effectively convey the outward steel and inner fragility of these men of war but the film is slow-moving and maudlin.
The film, directed by former Israeli solider Oren Moverman, has moments of dark humour along with a scepticism of the procedures, religious or military, through which death is comprehended.
The subject matter is heart-rending, but the film is also remarkably funny, sparkling with gallows humour without ever being disrespectful to the soldiers or their families.
General release. Check local listings for show times.
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