A powerhouse of a film about modern journalism and war, with battle scenes that have the immediacy and impact of the famed opening sequence of "Saving Private Ryan."

MacDowell gives an uneven performance, as she often does, but Strathairn is ideally cast as the conflicted husband.

It's that very savagery -- not its love-can-conquer-all theme -- that makes Harrison's Flowers worth picking.

At its heart, Harrison's Flowers is a love story, albeit a graphic and difficult one.

MacDowell brings an absolutely riveting conviction to her role. She's strong stuff in a movie that is likewise gripping and powerful.

A powerful portrait of modern journalism and the nobility -- and futility -- of chronicling modern war.

Provides powerful drama thanks to its trenchant core story and harrowing re-creation of the brutal chaos of war.

The movie's still a solid "B," a workmanlike drama.

It's a chillingly cautionary tale. Less an anti-war than a pro-order film, it tells us that the veneer of civilization is paper thin.

Doesn't say much of anything at all about the Balkan conflict -- it's more concerned with MacDowell's shattered face and Brody's passionate, paranoid whinny, which, come to think of it, is just good enough.

A chintzy melodrama gussied up as hair-trigger combat ''reality,'' but there's no denying the vividness with which the French cowriter-director Elie Chouraqui has visualized the chaos of Croatia.

The movie exhibits the usual indifference to the issues involved. Although it was written and directed by Elie Chouraqui, a Frenchman, it is comfortably xenophobic. Most Americans have never understood the differences among Croats, Serbs and Bosnians, and this film is no help.

As far-fetched as it sometimes seems, the film resonates in the wake of the murder of Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl.

Gets the hell of war right and struggles to depict the unyielding passion of love. But the two sides make for an uneasy mix, one that not even the actors seem comfortable with.