Stop-Loss

It feels like the wrong time of year to be talking Oscars, but Stop-Loss deserves to be remembered 10 months from now.

Without pulling any punches, the film is pro-soldier, anti-bureaucrat, war-neutral, and deeply, deeply affecting.

Stop-Loss director Kimberly Peirce has a younger brother who served in Iraq, and her first film since 1999's Boys Don't Cry feels like an honest attempt to come to terms with the conflict and its many casualties.

Here's the first major movie of the new year that touches greatness.

Stop-Loss also is one of the few movies that understand the complexity of choosing military service and don't stereotype soldiers (as some movies have) as violence-prone brutes or flag-waving chumps.

With its dual focus on war in Iraq and conflict in American soldiers' hometowns, Stop-Loss may be the most morally complicated film about warfare and its aftermath since The Deer Hunter.

It's been nearly 10 years since director Kimberly Peirce made her shattering debut with Boys Don't Cry, but it's been worth the wait.

Showing a depth and maturity unthinkable during his early days as a pretty-boy male starlet, Ryan Phillippe stars as a skilled soldier who returns home from a particularly hellacious tour in Iraq.

Writer-director Kimberly Peirce, in her first film since 1999's Boys Don't Cry, is guilty of painting perhaps too bleak a picture.

There's a keen and ugly sense of anguish to Stop-Loss, a caged sense of powerlessness beyond political outrage that makes this film far and away the most effective effort yet at capturing the frustration of the war in Iraq.

Stop-Loss is one of the best of the many Iraq War/War on Terror dramas because it is the most personal.

It is a powerful, indignant film that deserves to be seen and discussed, even if it seems likely to suffer the same box-office indifference of so many Middle East war films before it.

Director Kimberley Pierce’s film, her first since the groundbreaking Boys Don’t Cry, is at equal measures a bold in-your-face war movie, with a taut opening sequence of a military operation gone wrong in Iraq.

Stop-Loss ends on a note that will frustrate some, depending which side they're on by the film's ending.

Although there are moments of the awkward melodrama in this ambitious war/home-front film, this is no slump effort.

Movies have rarely depicted brothers in arms with as much accuracy and compassion as Stop-Loss.

There is no mistaking the passions that drive the filmmaker's heart, however; Stop-Loss builds a cumulative power and sense of urgency that can't be denied.

The realism of scenes in Iraq and Texas becomes scarce as Stop-Loss moves forward.

Stop-Loss doesn't quite pack the dramatic punch of Peirce's only previous feature, the riveting gender-hiding drama Boys Don't Cry of 1999.

There may be a star-making performance in Stop-Loss, that of Abbie Cornish, as our hero's childhood friend.

Stop-Loss at times struggles to keep its narrative momentum; a repeated theme of soldier-made videos from the war front, accompanied by rock music, seems to interrupt the drama rather than heighten it.

It features great photography, a handsome young cast -- including Ryan Phillippe and indie-it boy Joseph Gordon-Levitt -- and a topical and important subject.

The immediate displays of posttraumatic stress disorder by the recently returned soldiers -- redolent with flashbacks, visions and outbursts of horrific violence -- border on mockery of the affliction.

The last act in the film is somewhat disappointing, perhaps because there is no satisfactory way to conclude the story.

With the announcement this week that the 4,000th American soldier has died in Iraq, the timing of Stop-Loss could not be more gruesomely appropriate.

Kimberly Peirce's follow-up to the acclaimed indie Boys Don't Cry is the latest whack at getting moviegoers interested in the Iraq war, this time through a very personal perspective (Peirce's brother served in Iraq).

Strewn story parts pile up in Stop-Loss, a painfully polite Iraq war drama pitched at the MTV generation.

In the hands of director Kimberly Pierce the Stop-Loss policy triggers a muddled melodrama that alternates moments of real power with confused and lifeless sequences.

While there are good things about it, Stop-Loss is nothing spectacular.

Because Stop-Loss wants to steer a middle-American path, it stops short of making a definitive statement. And that's our loss.

Chances are you don't want to see this movie. Chalk it up to war fatigue or a general malaise -- whatever the reason, Iraq-themed movies just aren't getting a lot of love at the box office.

The Iraq war drama has its share of very effective, subtle moments but then follows them up with some crushingly heavy-handed commentary.

When Stop-Loss finally ceases beating around the bush -- no, not George W. -- it’s powerful, stirring and even bipartisan in a sense. Unfortunately, it takes a while to get there.

If it fails as a whole, it's not for lack of trying -- and there are individual scenes that display an unaffected force and poignancy gone missing from the rest of the film.

Both the audience and the artists may still be too close to the conflict to be either completely objective or truly creative.

Despite several attempts, we're still waiting for the drama that convincingly captures the experience of soldiers who've fought in Iraq. Stop-Loss isn't that film, but at the very least its efforts are honorable.

No director, including Peirce, has managed to make a Platoon for the Iraq War generation. Maybe that's impossible in 2008, but Peirce makes a very noble, heartfelt attempt.

There's no sex in the movie and no romance, just the tense relations of men who are always on the edge of either violence or fear or the tearful emotions of masculine camaraderie.

Stop-Loss can't quite decide whether to focus on making a powerful statement on a controversial and unfamiliar military policy or on a more predictable drama about the traumatic effect of war on young people's lives.

One of the problems with Stop-Loss is credibility. Unlike, say, the recruits from the Pennsylvania steel-mill town in The Deer Hunter (1978), the soldiers in Stop-Loss don’t come across as genuine people. They’re types.

Unfortunately, the film makes all its points in broad, predictable strokes (with the exception of the ending).

Stop-Loss does not deign to do what the audience may expect or want or need.

Any suspicions that Kimberly Peirce was a one-note art house auteur will be immediately assuaged by the full-throttle war-film assuredness of the opening sequences of her Iraq war film Stop-Loss.

Kimberly Peirce’s Stop-Loss, which is probably the least politicized Iraq war drama to date, probes the hardwired loyalties of homecoming grunts without belittling their patriotism.

Director Kimberly Peirce has managed to make a movie that is vehemently antiwar while 100 percent sympathetic to the troops.

Director Kimberly Peirce's meandering and uncertain drama attempts to speak on behalf of the American fighting man, but her own protests seem loudest.

Stop-Loss is co-produced by MTV, and the soundtrack consequently works overtime.

Despite the sincerity of its aspirations, Stop-Loss is hampered by awkward construction.

Stop-Loss is a policy dripping with controversy that deserves a complete examination, but Stop-Loss just provides a one-sided account covered with an MTV-style coating.

If you want to make a film about the soldiers fighting overseas, make sure it's a story about them, not the political beliefs you want to share with the audience.

That Stop-Loss wears its generally good intentions on its camo sleeve doesn't keep it from being consigned to the missed-opportunity file.

Still-green actor Ryan Phillippe has undermined yet another promising film.

Peirce, whose only previous credit is the indie drama Boys Don't Cry (1999), shows a wholly unexpected flair for action filmmaking; and her affection for the cast of gifted young American actors is very evident.

The direction here utilizes the overly-familiar, de-saturated grain of the half-documentary approach to ensure its own sense of "realism."

As we turn the corner on five years of the Iraq war, can still no one make a war-homecoming drama both relevant and necessary?

It seems a little crass to say it, but the moral of Stop-Loss appears to be this: Post Traumatic Stress Disorder leads to clichés.

Writer/director Kimberly Peirce takes on the war in Iraqinher first theatrica l release since 1999, and in Stop-Loss she clearly wants the audience to learn a lesson.

After five years of news footage and documentaries coming from the war in Iraq, Stop-Loss is as phony as a re-enactment with finger pup pets.