Kurt Loder Reviews Zero Dark Thirty

Zero Dark Thirty, Katherine Bigelow's terrific new terror-war thriller about the decade-long hunt for Osama bin Laden, achieves something rare in a Hollywood movie, writes Kurt Loder: It presents a hot-button subject—torture as a means of American intelligence-gathering—without the usual moral nudging. The paroxysms of outrage that this has stirred in some precincts of the pundit class are baffling, but predictable. These commentators are offended that no character in the film has been deputized to express the revulsion we should be feeling about what we're seeing—as if we, unlike the pundits, can't feel that revulsion without some sort of condescending assistance.