By Craig Mathieson
ZERO DARK THIRTY (2012)
M, 157 minutes
Jessica Chastain in Zero Dark Thirty.
In the film Miss Sloane, out next month, Jessica Chastain plays a by-any-means-necessary lobbyist who goes up against America's National Rifle Association in a bid to tighten gun control laws.
Hopefully, after a few years of capable but hardly challenging parts in blockbusters such as The Martian and The Huntsman: Winter's War, this is a return to the Chastain who shot to prominence in 2011 with a handful of diverse and compelling performances – Take Shelter, Tree of Life, Coriolanus and The Help – that culminated in her Academy Award-nominated lead role in Zero Dark Thirty.
In Kathryn Bigelow's extraordinary drama about the War on Terror, which begins with 9/11 and ends a decade later with the death of Osama bin Laden and is based on real-life participants, Chastain plays Maya, a CIA analyst new to Pakistan. With her red hair and translucent skin, she looks otherworldly amid the machinery of the intelligence state, but Maya is so driven that she's willing to become a fanatic in order to destroy one.
Pursuing hunches while monitoring torture sessions and drone strikes, she is the face of 21st-century war in the West.
Bigelow gives the film a geographic specificity and a torrid uneasiness, culminating in the long set-piece at bin Laden's Pakistan compound.