Year: 2019 Director: Matthew Heineman
I can’t imagine this film will be seen by many people unaware of Marie Colvin’s story – (spoiler alert) sometimes described as a “rock star” reporter she was a prominent writer for the Sunday Times until her murder by the Assad regime in 2012.
The New Yorker recently described Colvin as someone with “a chronic willingness to throw herself into danger”; all the more remarkable given the PTSD she suffered as a consequence. It’s a gritty at times visceral film depicting war with an immediacy that startles possibly because Colvin’s only weapon were her words. Her interest was in the people, not who lost and who won.
Although very much a film about war, it sidesteps glamourising it. There are many harrowing scenes – starving children, mass graves, – but Director Matthew Heineman keeps Colvin’s character, and the way she deals with devastation it wrecks on the civilians the focal point, rather than the gunfire and explosions.
Scenes in war zones dominate the film, but it’s balanced by seeing Colvin away from the battle front – a technophobe who has contempt for her paper’s management and but accepts the accolades and awards, drinking » Continue Reading.