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A brave, mighty movie film reviews

A Mighty Heart (English)

Cast: Angelina Jolie, Dan

Futterman, Archie Panjabi,

Irrfan Khan

Director: Michael Winterbottom

This is a movie that could have gone so wrong but has managed to be pitch-perfect. This is the story of the vigil and hunt for Daniel Pearl, South Asia Bureau chief of Wall Street Journal.

On January 22, 2002, Pearl was doing a final interview for his story on the shoe bomber Richard Reid in Karachi before going home with his wife Marianne, also a journalist, who was pregnant with the couple’s first child.

He never returned and we all know the gruesome end of the heart-breaking five-week search.

Director Winterbottom should be credited for crafting a taut thriller as well as presenting a remarkably mature perspective of the events. When it is so easy to go ballistic and fan the flames of hatred and intolerance, the film echoes Pearl’s motto of open mindedness and courage.

There are multiple points of view and each voice is given a space to make itself heard.

This is not a Jerry Bruckheimer film where the FBI comes in a flurry of whirring choppers to save the day. This is a movie where leads are painstakingly followed, where emails and cellphones provide vital clues and logical conclusions are drawn.

The cast is stellar for the amount of emotion they invest in each character. And towering over them all is Angelina Jolie, who effortlessly enters the skin of Marianne Pearl, the waiting wife who refuses to give up hope, who hides her anxiety under a carefully constructed but increasingly brittle veneer of stoicism.

And matching her in every frame is Irrfan Khan as Captain, head of Pakistan’s counter terrorism unit. Archie Panjabi is excellent as Asra, friend and Daniel’s colleague.

Shot in France, India and Pakistan, A Mighty Heart is a movie to be watched for the story it tells, the way it tells it and the points it makes us think about.

MINI ANTHIKAD-CHHIBBER

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