Eye in the Sky

A British colonel (Helen Mirren), two American surveillance-drone specialists (Aaron Paul, Phoebe Fox), the colonel’s commanding general (Alan Rickman) and the United Kingdom’s defense minister (Jeremy Northam) all communicate on an operation to capture a radicalized British woman in Nairobi—until the woman and her cohorts are seen preparing a suicide bombing. Then the objective changes from capture to kill, with all the attendant military and political implications. Writer Guy Hibbert’s tense, complex script and Gavin Hood’s razor-sharp direction make this one of the best movies of the year so far—a riveting, white-knuckle thriller to rank with the best of Hitchcock, and an examination of the morality of drone warfare to rank with the polemical plays of George Bernard Shaw, where every side gets its fair say. J.L.