By Scott Feinberg
The Hollywood Reporter
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Zero Dark Thirty, written by Mark Boal and directed by Kathryn Bigelow — who both won Oscars for their last film, 2009’s best picture winner The Hurt Locker — screened Sunday for press on both coasts. The film provides a two-hour-and-40-minute overview of America’s nearly decade-long effort to hunt down Osama bin Laden. As a moviegoing experience — as it was in life — it is a long, cerebral and emotionally draining story, but it holds interest throughout. And thanks to a minimalist but powerful star turn by Jessica Chastain — an Oscar nominee last year for The Help — as well as the filmmakers’ painstaking attention to documented detail and remarkable third-act re-creation of the Navy SEALs’ fateful mission, it is worth the journey. As with fellow best picture Oscar hopeful Argo, you knows how it ends before it begins, and yet you can’t help but sit nervously on the edge of your seat as it nears its resolution.