The Yellow Birds (2017)

Capped by a truly lovely final shot, The Yellow Birds (the title comes from a particularly cruel Army cadence) is about unseen wounds and wasted lives. The closer we get to these young men, the closer we are to wondering how many more of these stories we can bear to hear.

The Yellow Birds is a war movie whose outlines may be familiar — but its emotional clarity gives this drama an almost crushing sense of intimacy.

Yellow Birds goes heavy on the brooding, and even though a lot of it looks gorgeous and carries the whiff of great importance it is ultimately stunted by a central event that isn’t worth the mystery that surrounds it.

Moors is a filmmaker with immense talent, as demonstrated in his Sundance film Blue Caprice from a few years back, but the beats don’t quite align this time around.

An excellent novel about the Iraq War and its homefront fallout has been turned into a rather flat and disappointing film in The Yellow Birds.