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Michael Winterbottom, the director of A Mighty Heart, the new true story drama about the wife of slain journalist Daniel Pearl, is a prolific auteur. He’s made a dozen features in the past ten years alone. It’s hard to find a throughline in his work since he’s dabbled in comedy (A Cock and Bull Story), musical biography (24 Hour Party People), sex (9 Songs) and literary adaptations (JudeA Mighty Heart is his second trip to the war journalist drama after Welcome to Sarajevo (1997). I’m not sure his work contains a defining recognizable characteristic but he’s certainly drawn to the political and brings a sharp intelligence to the director’s chair. Contrary to his new film’s title, this movie doesn’t rely too heavily on the heart… at least not in the Hollywood four-hankie sense of the word.

So he’s a good match for Mariane Pearl (Angelina Jolie), the tough unsentimental protagonist at the heart of this drama. He begins the film with a brief narrated time setter: Mariane, a French journalist married to an American Wall Street Journal reporter, explains the migration of journalists to Pakistan in the aftermath of 9/11. Then, starting with very quick visual edits of Pakistan, he immediately infuses the story with a welcome bustling energy. Winterbottom and his editor Peter Christelis rarely let that energy flag in this extremely tense movie about the search for Daniel Pearl (Dan Futterman). He’s gone missing after leaving for a sketchy interview with a religious leader. The sense of urgency is palpable and that’s a mighty achievement given that we know going in that Daniel’s not coming out with us in the end.

Jolie sinks right into Mariane’s skin, reminding the moviegoer why she became a star in the first place: talent. Yes and remarkable beauty. Fortunately for the film her beauty is beside the point though the magnitude of her stardom does stir up strange associations that other insightful reviewers have already noted: Mariane in the film can seem like our collective images of celebrities from real life -- surrounded by bodyguards, an entourage tiptoeing around her eager to please, unable to leave her house with photographers swarming outside.

One particularly smart thing about the movie is the way that Mariane’s residence (which belongs to her Indian journalist friend Asra, played by Archie Panjabi) feels so calm and quiet at the beginning. You recognize quickly, through the telltale signs of armed guards at the gates, that it’s more like the eye of the storm. After Daniel’s kidnapping, the house reads more like a chaotic military compound than a home… a disquieting place to be holed up. The storm has moved inside: the political has become personal.

In the end the best thing about A Mighty Heart is the very thing that’s most potentially maddening to the moviegoer. Movies (and TV) have raised us on a steady diet of emotional sensationalism and international politics reduced to ‘cowboys and indians’ but, like its protagonist, this one keeps a cool head, rarely sinking into emotional outbursts (though they’re earned when they arrive). The world would be better for more Mariane Pearls, people able to keep their wits about them and their emotions in check even in the most horrific and extreme of situations. Certainly long term wars cannot be won by letting (or encouraging) emotions, religiosity and fears to run wild. A Mighty Heart won’t be for everyone which is a shame. It’s one of those movies that plays like a concerned global citizen.