Restrepo

Like fish in a barrel. That’s how one American soldier describes life at outpost Restrepo (named after a fallen comrade) in the isolated, Taliban-besieged Korengal Valley of eastern Afghanistan. Filmmakers Tim Hetherington (an award-winning war photographer) and Sebastian Junger (best known as the author of The Perfect Storm) hunkered down in this valley for a year with a combat platoon and somehow returned with a jarring, intimate, incisive, heartbreaking, darkly humored, anxiety-drenched snapshot that answers just about every question of what is really happening in this particular war—except how the heck we are supposed to win it. An Oscar nomination looms in the wings. It has already won the National Board of Review award for Best Directorial Debut and the Sundance Film Festival Grand Jury Prize.