Set in the midst of the Iraq war, this contemporary morality play from writer-director Paul Haggis (Crash) follows a veteran (Tommy Lee Jones) searching for his soldier son, who has gone missing since returning home from the front. It’s a bleak emotional landscape, scarred by the trauma of conflicts past and present. Haggis may be our patron saint of noble cinema, yet he’s cagier than such a title would suggest. Consider the way he makes Jones – who has rarely been better – a patriotic veteran rather than a righteous peacenik. Haggis wants to get at the bull-headed absurdity of the war from the inside out. With Charlize Theron as a local police detective who lets Jones tag along on the case.
