Source URL: http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/review/manhunt-sundance-review-414200
Manhunt: Sundance Review 7:02 PM PST 1/21/2013 by John DeFore
The Bottom Line Gripping procedural only can benefit from controversy over "Zero Dark Thirty."
Venue: Sundance Film Festival (U.S. Documentary Competition)
Director: Greg Barker
Greg Barker makes the decades-spanning investigation into Osama bin Laden comprehensible in a sharp, involving doc. PARK CITY — The flip side of Richard Rowley's Dirty Wars, which registers horror at the vast sprawl of U.S. secret military activity, Greg Barker's Manhunt is a fascinated account of one instance where all that shadowy work eventually achieved the desired effect. Acknowledging serious moral questions but setting them outside its purview, the thoroughly involving doc sheds light on how information was pieced together while leaving debates over the techniques that gathered it for viewers to conduct. Interest should be strong for its May HBO airdate. Where Zero Dark Thirty introduced audiences to the important role female agents played in this campaign, Manhunt goes further, making it clear just how woman-driven the early analysis of bin Laden's activities was. We meet what the film calls "The Sisterhood," analysts whose careful study of Middle East intel caused them to focus on him almost a decade before 9/11. The women both defy stereotype and embrace the different ways men and women think: Cindy Storer, seen teary-eyed here more than once, suggests that a woman's tears are a lot less unproductive to an investigation than having an angry man throw things around.