Restrepo (2010)

This movie will stir your heart and open your mind. It's a group portrait of practicing patriots.

Restrepo can be tedious at times and nerve-racking at others, but why shouldn't it be? That's exactly what Junger and Hetherington saw on the front lines, so that's what they show, with very little filter.

The film is a nearly unrelenting nightmare. Even interviews shot with the survivors after the fact have a current of dread.

The low-key quality of the filmmaking in Restrepo only intensifies the reality of how much these kids are risking.

For a movie that's both a study and a product of blood, sweat, and tears, an oft-cited mid-'60s quote from film and combat vet Samuel Fuller seems to apply: "Film is a battlefield," Fuller said in Jean-Luc Godard's Pierrot le fou. "There's love, hate, action, violence, death. In a word: emotions."