Yet there is a brutal symmetry between the film’s opening moments—a black screen, just the sounds of 911 calls from the smoking towers—and its denouement: the raid against the architect of their deaths, the killing that was meant to avenge them. These cinematic stanzas are punctuated with last gasps and desperate pleas. An office worker sobs to a 911 operator who can only advise her to calm down; just before the line cuts out, her voice gets impossibly small: “I’m going to die, aren’t I?” A decade later, in Abbottabad, a young girl cries “Daddy” through a volley of gunshots; her brothers and sisters weep and scream as combat boots thunder up stairwells.

Anyone who enters the theater expecting “Call of Duty: We Got Bin Laden” will be gravely disappointed with the somber, meditative film that unfurls in front of them. Zero Dark Thirty doesn’t indulge in breathless reveling; it’s a brooding, muscular piece about obsession and vengeance. There are certainly very real, very vital questions about whether torture (we’re way past kidding ourselves with terms like “enhanced interrogation techniques”) should ever be employed; however, these are not questions that the movie’s characters—analysts and operatives, soldiers and guards—ever debate on-screen (or even internally). Bigelow and screenwriter Mark Boal treat torture through the vantage point of their protagonist, a young CIA agent named Maya (Jessica Chastain): It is a means to an end. Detainees are water-boarded and rammed into hot boxes, but we’re standing on the side of the men and women holding the hoses, clicking the dog collars shut. And for them, it’s positively quotidian, par for the course. Dan, the agent who first schools Maya in “enhanced interrogation techniques,” downs an ice cream cone before setting to work (A guard quips, “You agency guys are twisted.”).

Various be-suited higher-ups pound their fists on conference tables and yell about protecting the homeland, yet the very first interrogation scene—the first real scene in the movie—immediately follows that black screen, the cries of doomed Americans. What we see next—a suspected al-Qaeda financier strung up from the ceiling—is about “gathering intelligence,” but it is also about punishment. “This,” Dan tells the financier, “is what defeat looks like.”

Though we are, as a nation, ostensibly engaged in a “war on terror,” we don’t often, as individuals (or, at least, civilians) feel particularly embattled (or even inconvenienced). Still, our history has, by and large, been divided into a before and after. Simone de Beauvoir, writing from a freshly-liberated, still-tattered France, wondered if vengeance could ever serve as restitution: “All of us have more or less felt it: the need to punish, to avenge ourselves … Is it well-founded? Can it be satisfied?”

These are clearly not questions that Maya, a feminine exemplar of Eastwoodian grit, loses sleep over. At one point, then-CIA director Leon Panetta (a rumpled, weary James Gandolfini) asks her if, in her twelve years with the agency, she’s done anything other than search for bin Laden. “No,” she says, simply, forcefully. She is singular in her pursuit, an arrow shot from a taut bow. But Maya is no hero; she is, as she tells Panetta, “the motherfucker” who found bin Laden’s compound, and it is this identity—not the “God and country” invoked by the Navy Seal who calls in bin Laden’s death—that compels her. When a suicide bomber murders her only real friend, a slow-talking Southerner who bakes a birthday cake for an al-Qaeda operative she hopes to flip as an asset, Maya vows to “smoke everyone involved in this op, and then I’m going to kill bin Laden.” 

A national grievance is writ small, making the partisan hoopla over Zero Dark Thirty’s original pre-election release date particularly insipid. President Obama only appears as a talking head on a TV screen, promising that, “America doesn’t torture” with what seems, in hindsight, to be a willful naiveté. We all know that Gitmo doesn’t close. We all know about the drones.

However, the film’s amended December-January release situates it in an oddly appropriate cultural moment, one in which a spate of very public crimes—a murder that Indian authorities didn’t prosecute until the country exploded in protest; the gang-rape of a sixteen-year-old that Ohio authorities simply buried until Anonymous intervened—has challenged us to decide if we can sleep at night knowing that our peace of mind was delivered “by any means necessary.”

The street rioting in India and online vigilantism of Anonymous has, arguably, yielded results: arrests have been made and conspirators have been shamed. Zero Dark Thirty’s Maya might say that her interrogations serve a similar purpose. She’d also likely agree with de Beauvoir’s assertion that, “one hates only men, not because they are material causes of material damage, but because they are conscious authors of genuine evil.” Or, as a commenter on a Huffington Post piece condemning the film, succinctly put it: “I have no sympathy for torture. Then again, I have no sympathy for the people being tortured.”

Though it’s structured like a traditional procedural, Zero Dark Thirty is a shifting inkblot of a film: A myriad of meanings float up from its white spaces. A battered detainee refuses to yield information about an attack in London: Days later, on July 7, 2005, a series of coordinated suicide bombings will kill fifty-two people. Just before we’re able to knit a tidy conclusion about the ineffectiveness of such brutality, the filmmakers pivot: Once ninety-six hours of sleep deprivation has weakened the detainee, Maya is able to trick him into giving up the name of bin Laden’s courier; this is the lead that pitches her down the rabbit hole, until she emerges again on a desert air field, watching twin helicopters rise toward Pakistan.

Those of us who might not normally support violence or vigilantism have, perhaps, felt a moment of pause, a slowness to condemn the Indian rioters or Anonymous; perhaps this is because they’re striking out against laws and cultures that have, so oppressively, so systematically, denied so many vulnerable people any semblance of justice, or hope. But Maya and her cohorts aren’t shattering any paradigms—they’re cogs in a government wheelhouse. “I want targets,” bellows one of the top brass. “Do your fucking jobs. Bring me people to kill.” Yet the movie’s most chilling line of dialogue isn’t a threat, it’s a bit of banter between co-workers: “You don’t want to be the last one holding a dog collar when the oversight committee comes.”

Maya may or may not be the last one holding a dog collar, but she is, above all else, a woman alone. Chastain endows her with an artic reserve that is compelling, not inscrutable. She is, at times, astoundingly arrogant: screaming in the face of a section chief who asks her to redirect her energies toward preventing another attack, not hunting bin Laden; haranguing another higher-up who can’t get the White House to okay a raid fast enough for her liking; telling the Navy Seal squad leader that she’d have preferred to bomb the compound, but that he and his team will have to “kill bin Laden for me.” Yet she is still very much a young twentysomething with a photo of her and her friend as her screensaver; there is underbelly beneath the brittleness. Hours before her fellow citizens will swarm the streets, singing “God Bless America,” Maya sits alone, crying. Her tears are not of exhaustion, or even relief; her face breaks open with loss.

De Beauvoir cautioned her countrymen against believing that they could ever find succor in vengeance. The common refrain of the aggrieved, “they must pay,” betrays a desire for a “balancing of wrongs,” to see their aggressors suffer a comparable horror. This is a truth born out in Bigelow’s bravura staging of that May raid, especially the claustrophobic effect of shooting in night vision. The sickening intimacy of the sequences—tight huddles of men charging narrow stairways, narrow rooms—makes the whole endeavor seem small. There’s no grand, cathartic showdown, no real firefight. There is only a man poking his head out of a room before he’s shot between the eyes. There is nothing that could conjure back 3,000 lives and bring them, like Lazarus, out of the rubble.

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This fleeing pathos is the only moment of genuine emotion in the movie’s entire ninety-three minutes. Haywire is more a stunt showcase than an actual movie, albeit one shot with that distinctive Soderbergh cool. Gina Carano, the mixed martial arts fighter who portrays Mallory (and by portrays, I mean responds to the other actors when they call her that name) has been ballyhooed as a “new” type of action heroine, one far grittier and more realistic than the Hollywood gamines whose tough-girl acts are fetishized for their incredulity. Joss Whedon has built an entire career from the “waif-fu” archetype; part of Buffy the Vampire Slayer’s appeal is that she looks like the cheerleader who gets it in the first five minutes of any slasher flick.

The female action hero’s ability to execute an axe kick or wield a stake may give her power, but for that power to be legitimated, it usually coincides with her vulnerability. The first time we see Evelyn Salt (Angelina Jolie) in the movie that bears her name, she’s being waterboarded in a North Korean prison, naked save her panties and bra. The opening shot of Kill Bill is iconic for its brutality: the Bride’s frantic panting and her battered face, eyes as black as oyster shells. Though Saoirse Ronan’s teenage assassin, Hanna, is spared these savageries, her youth and naïveté inspire protectiveness in the viewer.

With the blunt muscularity of a pitbull and a surplus of inscrutable cool, Carano upends this trend and replaces it with—well, I’m not sure exactly. Her character’s arc is like the film’s extended rooftop chase scene: we’re dazzled by her acrobatics but not terribly invested in the outcome, mostly because we know she’s going to be okay. And even if she wasn’t, we simply don’t know enough about her to really care. We know that she is close to her father, exceptional at her job, and (above all else) she eschews feminine frills (“Paul can wear the dress,” she sneers at her boss, Kenneth, when he tells her that her new mission is to pose as the wife of an undercover agent).  “You shouldn’t think of her as a woman,” Kenneth (Ewan McGregor) tells the agent he’s contracted to kill her. “That’d be a mistake.” These lines serve as a directive to the audience; the filmmakers revel in Mallory’s macho side so thoroughly that they forget to endow her with other (presumably more human) traits. Scott Tobias sums up Mallory’s characterization (or lack thereof) in his review for The A.V. Club: “… Soderbergh and [screenwriter Lem] Dobbs have given her a role of Man With No Name terseness and allowed her to negotiate this world of powerful men by squeezing their necks in a scissor-lock.”

It’s a role that Eastwood could still play in his sleep, one that has been paying Jason Statham’s mortgage for years. With some tweaks to the script, Haywire could’ve easily swapped Carano for Statham and been the same film. This egalitarianism should seem admirable, a counterpoint to all those breathless headlines about the massive rewrites needed to change Salt from a Tom Cruise movie to another jewel in the crown of Jolie’s action oeuvre. After all, would we ever see Tom Cruise stripped to his underwear, sobbing to his captors that he’s not who they think he is, he just wants to go home (even if it’s just part of his character’s cover as a guileless businessman)? Would we ever see him rescued after his scientist girlfriend lobbied the CIA?

Or, we might ask if these things even matter. Bulletproof protagonists make for dull drama. In Salt, gender reversals go both ways: The boyfriend (soon husband) who rescues Salt from the Korean prison becomes her moral anchor—a function that is typically served by the female love interest (think Franka Potente in the Bourne trilogy). “Had a man played the lead role,” writes Slate’s Dana Stevens, “[it] would have come off as dated and predictable.” Certainly I could say the same about Haywire; however, the movie is dated and predictable even with a female lead.

Carano’s character is written without a trace of wit or verve. Though reviewers like Tobias argue that Soderbergh and Dobbs are simply playing to their leading lady’s strengths and sparing her (and, let’s be fair, themselves) from embarrassment, they make some uncomfortable correlations between her ability to kick ass and her refusal to wear the dress. When another agent notes, bemusedly, that Mallory seems out of her element surrounded by the well-heeled elite at a soiree, we’re supposed to nod with approval. Mallory can’t be cunning or competent if she doesn’t disdain pretty clothes and posh parties. The winking way the film packages Carano’s gender is problematic. “Don’t worry,” it seems to say, “she only looks like a woman.”

Other, better action films employ gender tropes to create actual stakes for their characters. Hanna’s voyage of self-discovery—leaving home for the first time, meeting that hipper-than-her-years friend with the lax parents, and realizing that her father isn’t all-powerful—could’ve been a thread in The Sisterhood of Traveling Pants (with a lot more neck-snapping and arrow wounds); the collateral damage caused by her quest for autonomy can’t help but remind us of the spectacular messiness we left behind in our own adolescent bids for freedom. Hanna’s desires and vulnerabilities may make her more of a “typical” teenage girl, but they don’t make her weak.

The Bride’s weapon of choice may be a Hattori Hanzo sword, but her rip-roarin’ rampage is powered by the abiding love she once felt for Bill. “I was a woman. I was your woman. I was a killer who killed for you. I would have jumped a motorcycle onto a speeding train, for you,” she tells him. We see her girlish reverence for her mentor just before he ships her off for the training that will turn her into the deadliest woman in the world. “When will I see you again?” she asks, her voice like something small and porcelain that’s shattered on the floor. The tragedy is, of course, in the movie’s title. Not only will she never see him again, she’ll be the one to make it so. Kill Bill derives its emotional resonance from the simple, almost Koan-like truth that, at the beginning of any relationship, it seems untenable that we should ever hurt, or be hurt by, our newly beloved. Sure, there is a vicious thrill in watching her slice her way through an army of minions, but what really keeps us invested in her story is the bloodlessness of the final showdown. We’ve never mowed anyone down with a samurai sword at dawn, but most of us have sat across the table from someone whose heart we’ve broken, or, who has, in turn, broken ours.

Soderbergh attempts a similar friction in Mallory’s relationship with Kenneth, but Carano and McGregor are two rain-rotted sticks knocking together—they just don’t spark. We have no sense of them as a couple. The only glimpse we get of what went wrong comes in Kenneth’s tossed off lament about never meeting Mallory’s dad. Of course, this is probably because Mallory (rightly) suspects he’s not the kind of guy you bring home to Papa (even if Papa was a highly decorated covert ops specialist back in his heyday). Still, the only character who expresses any emotion (let alone a wish for connectedness) is the smarmy villain.

Kenneth could’ve been written as an old army buddy who sells her out for a huge chunk of change and the story would’ve remained the same. Making him her ex-lover is a half-hearted attempt at “feminizing” Mallory. At the end of the day, she may have a mission, but she has no desire. If she’d been shown to us as anything other than an ass-kicking machine, the look that crosses her father’s face when he realizes who she really is could’ve been illuminative. For now, it’s just a tea light in a paper bag.

Despite its supposed intentions about introducing a new type of action hero, Haywire just affirms old archetypes. The truly subversive version of the woman warrior can wear the dress (and like it) and be a surgeon with a shotgun. She can want love and, if need be, beat a man to death with her bare hands. She can struggle with reconciling empowerment and cruelty, tenderness and weakness—just like the rest of us.

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The greatest compliment I can give McQueen and star Michael Fassbender is that, during the car ride home, I broke my own ban on Christmas music. After watching Fassbender’s Brandon systematically wrench any semblance of tenderness out of his life, I found the overwrought sentimentality of “I’ll Be Home for Christmas” palliative.

Shame is, in essence, a short story on the big screen. The forward action is driven by the seething interiority that distinguishes a Mary Gaitskill story: Certainly the characters’ actions (or lack thereof) move the plot along, but the hidden influences propelling them (or holding them back) is what breaks the reader’s heart. Parts of Shame recalled one of my favorite early Gaitskill stories, “An Affair, Edited,” a slice-of-life look at a New York account executive; memories of a college girlfriend whose intensity terrified him keep sifting through his current haze of hot spots and happy hours:

“Joel drank one paper cup of watered-down alcohol after another and stared at the moiling sweat-dampened crowd with an attitude of wistful contempt … He saw a girl standing alone at a bar, dressed like a twelve-year-old’s idea of a hooker … He remembered the blow-up doll he had once hung up in his Ann Arbor apartment as a party decoration. It wore Sara’s clothes and bore … a sign that read ‘Hurt Me Beat Me Fuck Me’ … Joel continued toward the girl at the bar, fighting the anxious crimp in his shoulders.”

This toggle through time contextualizes Joel’s petty cruelty without giving us its exact cause. Shame employs a similar device in its opening sequence: We cut between Brandon eye-fucking a woman on the subway and padding naked around his apartment, regarding the frantic female voice on his message machine with the same detachment as his morning piss; Brandon greeting a comely call girl with the same ardor he reserves for his jerks-at-work. In the span of a few moments, we can see that, despite the symphony of micro-expressions playing across Fassbender’s face as he takes in his fellow passenger, there’s no real joy in conquest, it’s just rubbing his knuckles over an insatiable itch.

Shame elevates “show, don’t tell” from a trite-but-truism into a Zen koan; volumes are written into its silences. As the call girl stands over Brandon’s bed, the camera cuts her head out of the frame and the audience sees her for all that she is to Brandon: a body. When he tells her to undress slowly, he’s only playing lip service to the rituals of seduction. Brandon stares off-screen, toward her face, toward something that simply isn’t there.

Flannery O’ Connor argued that in a good short story, “the details will … accumulate meaning from the story itself, and when this happens, they become symbolic in their action.” In Shame, details become the story. Most of the truly intimate moments—Brandon and his ne’er do well sister Sissy (Carey Mulligan) cracking wise as they wait for a morning train, the getting-to-know-you chit-chat between Brandon and the co-worker he tries to date, the fight between Brandon and Sissy that will be brutally familiar to anyone who has (or has been) a fucked-up sibling—are shot from behind. We get close-ups of shoulders and half-turned faces. When we’re denied everything that a shy smile or a sudden blink can tell us, we must read our own meaning into the scenes.

Critics like Slate’s Dana Stevens fault Shame for its obliqueness: “Shame … is … a psychological case study of sorts. But McQueen’s file on his patient is too thin. ‘We’re not bad people, we just come from a bad place,’ Sissy tells her brother urgently in one late scene. What place? (OK, we do learn they’re from New Jersey, but that can only account for so much trauma).” Stevens misses out on the genuine pleasure of watching this film, which, like the genuine pleasure of reading any good piece of fiction, is playing hopscotch through context clues.

Clipping in at 101 minutes, Shame simply can’t cover that file’s worth of material. It shares O’Connor’s preoccupation with “human action … as it is illuminated and outlined by mystery.” The mystery giving Shame its piston-pump of a heartbeat is the origin of Brandon’s addiction, an origin that is teased out in his interactions with Sissy. When we first see Sissy, she is (literally) his mirror twin; she steps naked from the shower, her body pale and damp and vulnerable. The camera holds her reflection in the mirror throughout their entire conversation (he never offers her a towel); this image of a woman bared against glass is repeated when Brandon fucks a blond call girl against a windowpane.

When shows like Boardwalk Empire and Dexter exploit the incest taboo directly, it becomes too grotesque to retain its power. The erotic undertones between Brandon and Sissy keep their dark potency because everything is implied. When Sissy catches Brandon masturbating in the bathroom, he charges out wearing only his towel, which slips down as he straddles her on the couch, screaming into her face.

Sissy is more passive-aggressive. She’s another poor man’s Marilyn, drifting from man to man and gig to gig. After her bittersweet rendering of “New York, New York” stirs her brother to tears, she sleeps with his dude-bro boss in his own bed. When Brandon is trying to sleep, Sissy slips under the comforter and spoons him, cooing that she’s cold. He snarls at her with a fury that made me jump in my seat.

We don’t know if Brandon is simply embarrassed that his sister spread her legs for his (married) employer, or if there is something sickeningly familiar in that moment, something that conjures the sounds of a doorknob turning and an unwelcome weight settling on his bed. We don’t know if he and Sissy have ever crossed that line, or if, in that “bad place” they come from, the lines were never drawn to begin with.

The answers wouldn’t illuminate the mystery; they’d blot it out under an antiseptic hospital light. All that is so richly, viscerally human about the film would be reduced to pathology. Even a scene that telegraphs its intent, like Brandon trailing his fingers over the scars along Sissy’s arm, remains deeply personal.  While watching Shame, anyone like me, who has (and has been) a fucked-up sibling, will feel years of blanket forts and snow angels, spat words and fumbling reconciliation churning to the surface. This is the power of good fiction: It lets us breathe meaning into blank spaces.

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