Top 10 Movies (Richard Schickel)

#8. In the Valley of Elah

A soldier returns to the U.S. after a tour of duty in Iraq, then goes missing at a Southern Army base. His father (Tommy Lee Jones), a retired career non-com, sets out to investigate his disappearance. In the course of interviewing his son's buddies he learns more about the brutalizing cost of service in an ugly and chaotic war than he — or we — perhaps care to know. Director (and co-writer) Paul Haggis' film is a spare, taciturn, devastating account of what happens to the souls of soldiers forced to fight wars for which not even phony or temporary justifications are offered them.

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