CineVue by Maximilian Von Thun

Heineman himself has said he feels an “enormous kinship” with Colvin’s commitment to revealing the human cost of conflict. And that, despite all her personal flaws, is what makes Colvin’s story so profoundly moving.

The Globe and Mail (Toronto) by Johanna Schneller

Based on a Vanity Fair article by Marie Brenner, the film doesn’t flinch from Colvin’s driven, destructive side. But it’s best when she’s on the ground in a war zone, bearing witness.

Wall Street Journal by Joe Morgenstern

The most compelling reason to see A Private War is Rosamund Pike’s stunning performance as Marie Colvin, the American war correspondent who died in a bombardment while covering the Syrian government’s 2012 siege of Homs.

The New York Times by Jeannette Catsoulis

Anchored by Rosamund Pike’s powerhouse lead performance, this restive, raw movie slowly accumulates the heft to render its flaws irrelevant.

Variety by Peter Debruge

A Private War manages to be simultaneously appalled by the humanitarian crises it depicts...and honest about the thrill that visiting such hot spots offered to someone who found it hard to readjust to her life in London between assignments.

Movie Nation by Roger Moore

Pike is magnificent in this part, giving us layers to the hard-drinking live-for-today chain-smoker who could be moved to tears, repeatedly, by the suffering she saw.

The Seattle Times by Moira Macdonald

Pike shows us both the strength and the quietly growing fear, as Marie becomes a jittery shadow, her voice getting thicker, more desperate.

Washington Post by Ann Hornaday

Finally, one of our finest actresses has been given material that calls on her to utterly transform herself — vocally, physically, seemingly existentially — and prove how gifted she’s been all along.

RogerEbert.com by Nell Minow

The dramatic, personal story of Colvin herself is absorbingly told here, largely because of Pike’s dynamic performance, showing us a woman who was courageous enough to risk her life for a story on a daily basis but remained vulnerable enough to make the stories viscerally compelling.

TheWrap by Carlos Aguilar

Pike, giving the kind of transformative performance that puts her squarely in the awards-season conversation, manifests Colvin’s brazen outspokenness with candor, and her irreparable brokenness via a cocktail of rage and subdued anxiety.

Entertainment Weekly by Leah Greenblatt

By the time the narrative comes to Colvin’s greatest get — she was essentially the first Western journalist to get inside Homs and refute Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s bold-faced lie that he wasn’t bombing his own people into oblivion — the price of that sacrifice, and the power of her story, feels finally, fully real. Whatever her private battles, War works hard to be the public reckoning her work deserves.

Observer by Rex Reed

Because it concentrates on her professional risks and accomplishments at the expense of the personal conflicts that give the film its title, it’s not a perfect film, but Rosamund Pike is so good in it that she’s certain to be remembered when the 2018 awards season rolls around.

IndieWire by David Ehrlich

A Private War resolves as such an effective memoir because even in its most clichéd moments — of which there are many — it resists easy psychoanalysis.

Vanity Fair by Richard Lawson

Directed by documentarian Matthew Heineman, no stranger to war-torn lands himself, A Private War casts a bracingly intimate gaze, and yet sometimes has the tinny, expositional clank of based-on-a-true-story cinema.

Screen International by Wendy Ide

Nimbly edited and directed with brio, this portrait of the legendary Sunday Times war correspondent Marie Colvin represents a sure-footed leap for director Matthew Heineman from documentary to factually-based drama.

The Hollywood Reporter by John DeFore

Honoring the journalist's sense of mission but never shying away from the hard living and psychological damage that went with it, A Private War relies on the believability of star Rosamund Pike, who commits to this take on the character even when Heineman risks pushing off-the-battlefield drama too far.

The Playlist by Victor Stiff

Aside from the striking scenes occurring on the battlefronts, everything else in this picture is subpar. “A Private War” works off a disjointed script and tells a dull story, populated with forgettable characters. Pike throws herself into Marie, and the intensity of her commitment is palpable, but the flashy performance feels soulless.