To skip Brian DePalma's new film, which Chris Willman of Entertainment Weekly describes as "Casualties of War meets The Blair Witch Project", two films I've watched once (barely surviving the Blair Witch Project without chundering from all of the handheld camera work projected onto a 30-foot high screen) and don't need to see again:

If Arabs upset at the American presence in Iraq kidnapped some American actors and forced them to make a propaganda film, they'd be hard-pressed to make one much more simple-minded than Redacted — though at least theirs probably wouldn't resemble a stagy, overacted, off-off-Broadway play quite as much as this one does. On a formal level, Redacted is fascinating; it consists entirely of faked "found" video footage, culled together from soldiers' camcorders, surveillance footage, and even terrorist websites. Yes, it's Casualties of War meets The Blair Witch Project. But the conceit of having sneering American soldiers passionately plan, commit, and cover up their heinous misdeeds in the full view of camera lenses ensures there's not a believable minute in a film that styles itself as a faux documentary. By the time you get to the actual rape scenes, you may feel you're watching a new genre: anti-war porn.

There seems to be a lot of that going around in Hollywood these days, often impacting the least-likeliest of movies. And incidentally, if you're Brian DePalma, and have made an anti-war film that has alienated anyone at Entertainment Weekly, a magazine that basically exists to rubberstamp all things Hollywood, you might want to get your dog-eared copy of Hitchcock & Truffaut out of the basement and start over again on page one. You've clearly made a wrong turn at the corner of Art and Politics.

Related: "Choose Your Preferred Narrative, but Quit Attacking the Troops".