A Mighty Heart received positive reviews from critics.
Rotten Tomatoes reports that 79% of critics gave the film positive reviews, based on 192 reviews. The site's consensus states: "Angelina Jolie conveys the full emotional range of a woman in a desperate situation in
A Mighty Heart, an urgent yet tactful film about a difficult subject."
Metacritic reported the film had an average score of 74 out of 100, based on 38 reviews. Jolie's performance was widely touted by top critics as her finest artistic achievement to date. Both she and the film received a positive review from
Roger Ebert. The film was described by
Newsweek as "a movie without melodrama or movie-star lighting...allowing Jolie to deliver the most delicate, powerful and human-scale performance of her career." Other favorable reviewers included
Peter Travers of
Rolling Stone,
Justin Chang of
Variety, and Ray Bennett of
The Hollywood Reporter. Marc Mohan of
The Oregonian named it the 10th best film of 2007. However, Andrew O'Hehir, film critic for
Salon, while finding Jolie's performance "restrained and dignified", dismissed the film itself, writing, "it feels like an extra-long episode of
24 with a bad conscience and a bad ending."
Entertainment Weeklys
Lisa Schwarzbaum felt that Jolie's celebrity was a problem, commenting that "Despite the best of intentions, an actress who makes her own headlines gets in the way of the big picture."
Asra Nomani—a colleague of Daniel Pearl who had agreed to participate in the film—stated that the film failed to portray Pearl as a journalist, doing his job, in favor of creating a dramatic arc of "ordinary heroes". She believes Pearl would have "rolled his eyes" at that description. Describing her own response to the film, Nomani said, "For me, watching the movie was like having people enter my home, rearrange the furniture and reprogram my memory." The announcement of the casting of Angelina Jolie in the role of
Mariane Pearl drew criticism within the African-American community.
Orville Lloyd Douglas, a pop critic, has criticized the casting because, he said, "Jolie is white" and Mariane Pearl is "mixed race"; Pearl is the multiracial daughter of an Afro-Chinese-Cuban mother and a Dutch Jewish father. Pearl personally chose Jolie to play the lead in
A Mighty Heart. In response to casting complaints, Pearl said "I have heard some criticism about her casting, but it is not about the color of your skin. It is about who you are. I asked her to play the role—even though she is way more beautiful than I am—because I felt a real kinship to her. She put her whole heart into it, and I think she understood why we should do this movie. We had something to say that we knew we should say together." ==Awards==