Lions for Lambs (15)

Liberal Hollywood sends its big guns into the "war on terror" and winds up in a dreadful mess. Set over a single morning, it presents a three-pronged attack on the way America has conducted the war in the Middle East and apportions blame between politicians, the media and the education system.

An ambitious project, and the screenplay by Matthew Carnahan, divided almost into three playlets, offers the sort of confrontational scenes that actors love. In Washington, a smarmy senator (Tom Cruise) announces a new military surge in Afghanistan to a veteran news reporter (Meryl Streep); in California, a politics professor (Robert Redford, also directing) tries to shake a bright student (Andrew Garfield) out of his apathy; and in the perishing mountains of Afghanistan, two young soldiers (Derek Luke, Michael Pena), former idealistic students of the professor, fight for their lives after that new "surge" goes belly-up.

It's all rather fishy from the get-go. Would it take Streep's newshound so long to twig that Cruise's senator is just another careerist hawk, and would she so meekly back off from the story? Is Redford's professor actually helping to recruit for a war that he allegedly deplores? Meanwhile, the two soldiers are seen as pawns of the politicians, but they're also pawns of film-makers who want it both ways – brave young warriors fighting an apparently unwinnable war. The title comes from a First World War German general's epithet for British soldiers and their commanders – "lions led by lambs". I'm not sure they've even got this right – wasn't it lions led by donkeys?