Michael Winterbottom's film is for that subset of the population who decided against downloading video of the murder by terrorists of journalist Daniel Pearl. A caramel-dipped Angelina Jolie plays Pearl’s wife, Mariane, injecting what could have been sensationalism with subtlety and not a shred of melodrama. David Edelstein glowingly remarked that “Jolie is a remarkably canny actress, and she plays Mariane with the kind of brusque economy that characterizes the real woman’s writing and public appearances.”