I’m too whipped to write my review today of Angelina Jolie‘s In the Land of Blood and Honey, but I can tell already that my generally positive reaction, which I wasn’t expecting to have, is a minority view among critics who’ve posted today. Hollywood Reporter critic Todd McCarthy is at least somewhat admiring.

“It’s clear within the first few minutes of In the Land of Blood and Honey, a blunt and brutal look at genocide and ethnic cleansing in Bosnia and Herzegovina in the early 1990s, that this is a serious piece of work and not simply a vanity project for its debuting writer-director, Angelina Jolie,” he begins.

“But while the personal story at its core carries some nuanced shadings, this impressively mounted production gradually reveals itself first and foremost as a compendium of atrocities, a catalogue of pointless abuse and killings no one did much to stop for three years.

“Fueled by her well-known attachment to humanitarian causes, the director trains an intense light on a situation most outsiders at the time preferred not to deal with and now would rather forget about, which means that Jolie would literally have to lead people by the hand into theaters for this Film District release to do any theatrical business beyond the already committed.”