American Sniper

The last public image that most people have of octogenarian actor/filmmaker Clint Eastwood is him at the 2012 GOP convention, losing an argument with an empty chair. There was good reason to fear the worst with his adaptation of the Chris Kyle biography American Sniper, so what a surprise that rather than an uncritical testament to the might of the armed forces (Heartbreak Ridge 2, say), Eastwood delivers this complex, conflicted and profoundly moving look at the military machine, and the toll it takes on the soldiers who keep getting shoveled back into the fire. American Sniper possesses the sweep and scope of Michael Cimino's The Deer Hunter, but very little of that movie's romantic grandeur. Eastwood is after something smaller and more personal—while Cimino turned the Vietnam War experience into myth, here Eastwood undermines the legend of a contemporary American warrior even as he is creating it.