Of Men and War

The access that Bécue-Renard got, reportedly after five months of being there without a camera, is remarkable ...

What emerges is a tapestry of despair, one defined by its persistence.

Filmed almost entirely inside the Pathway Home in California, a residential therapy center for veterans, this devastatingly raw documentary shows that for some the fighting may stop, but the suffering continues.

The horrors of the battlefield come home to roost in ways that are both riveting and deeply disturbing in Of Men and War, a remarkable chronicle of Iraq War veterans suffering from the devastating effects of PTSD.

The devastating toll of post-traumatic stress disorder inflicted by the Iraq and Afghanistan wars on U.S. soldiers is vividly presented in Of Men and War, a slow-burn documentary from France's Laurent Becue-Renard.

Disregard your personal feelings about the military, U.S. involvement in foreign wars, or a French director making a movie about Americans. This film is raw in the truest sense, yet refined in its sympathy and scope.

For all the individual horrors it documents, Of Men and War... is organized as a collective experience, following multiple, mostly unnamed veterans as they share in group or in pairs, expressing rage and fear, frustration, and small pleasures.

A hard-hitting documentary which zeroes in on the harrowing experiences of veterans and their families as they struggle to reclaim their lives.

Bécue-Renard shows the Pathway Home not as a means through which to forget wartime experiences, but to engage with the memory of them.

There is no battle footage or graphic imagery, but it's excruciating to watch -- a series of devastating, nakedly human moments showing the cost of war on the men sent to fight it.

So many war films talk about U.S. veterans suffering from PTSD. . . shows someone actually doing something effective about it - of veterans, for veterans, and by veterans.

A work of astounding sensitivity and precision, it argues for emotional honesty as a moral and psychic imperative.