Balibo -- Film Review

September 23, 2009 Expertly crafted for maximum impact, the fact-based political thriller "Balibo" throbs with an anger and a passion rarely seen in recent Australian cinema. Following a flurry of introspective family dramas, Robert Connolly ("The Bank," "Three Dollars") has made a pluckily unambivalent film that confronts big-picture geopolitics, managing to be vigorously entertaining even as it rails against a past wartime injustice. The fact that this wrong -- the shooting of five Australian journalists by invading Indonesian forces -- was perpetrated more than three decades ago in a tiny, under-the-radar nation called East Timor lessens the power of the film not a bit.

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