Tom Hanks (Charlie Wilson), Julia Roberts (Joanne Herring), Philip Seymour Hoffman (Gust Avrakotos), Amy Adams (Bonnie Bach), Ned Beatty (Doc Long)
If it’s the best politically themed movie to come around in a while, that may be because the director, Mike Nichols, and the screenwriter, Aaron Sorkin, grasp that politics, for all its seriousness, is an essentially comic undertaking.
—A.O. Smith, The New York Times
The fact that the mujahideen, armed by the United States, morphed into the Islamist haters of American freedom? Well, this movie spends its time averting its eyes from that terrible fact, and fastidiously declines to spell it out, other than with some supercilious warnings from Gust, and a fatuous and redundant postscript before the credits about ‘having fucked up the endgame’.
—Peter Bradshaw, The Guardian
Lucy’s article about this movie can be found here.
