More than two decades after then-Secretary of State James Baker famously said of the Bosnian War, "We don't have a dog in this fight," Jolie, who both wrote and directed In the Land of Blood and Honey, clearly does. But to her credit, she largely avoids cliché throughout the film—it's even scripted in native tongue, with English subtitles!—which, combined with the subject matter, makes for rather refreshing Hollywood product. Nevertheless, critics are getting all huffy that this is an activist film and therefore not art (an absurd notion to begin with) but fuck it—if a vanity project/Trojan Horse of reality driven by the name of a Hollywood star is what it takes to smack sense into some heads around here, let's open the gate. by Grant Brissey