This is an “old” (i.e., three days old) piece, but it’s worth quoting from regardless. It’s Entertainment Weekly critc Owen Gleiberman lamenting that United 93 didn’t take in any more than $30 million domestically (which isn’t that awful , considering how much people everywhere were talking about not seeing it. “I…found the experience of United 93 to be scary, inspiring, and cathartic,” Gleiberman wrote. “I felt closer, in a way that gave me a shudder, to what happened that day; I felt a little more connection to the brave people on that plane, much as I have when I’ve read, in the newspaper, those agonizing transcripts of their final moments. We don’t expect serious journalists to soft-pedal the news. So why do we say that a movie that dares to present itself as an incendiary act of dramatized journalism has touched the forbidden third rail? Why do we insist that it’s too real, too raw, too painful [and] too soon? I say: It’s not what’s up on screen that we should turn away from. It’s our fear of seeing it .”