Stop-Loss

Stop-Loss

Directed by Kimberly Peirce (R)

A military policy requires soldiers to return to Iraq.

Subscribe to The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up

***

Stop-Loss “has the juice to break the jinx” surrounding Iraq-war films, said Peter Travers in Rolling Stone. Kimberly Peirce, who directed and co-wrote Boys Don’t Cry, returns after a nine-year hiatus with this deeply personal and poignant film. Struck by her own brother’s tales from Iraq, Peirce set out to explore the effects of the military’s stop-loss orders, which extended certain enlistments indefinitely and have sent nearly 81,000 soldiers back to Iraq. Peirce’s story about four young Texans on the home front creates a harrowing “emotional battlefield” that “strikes a universal chord that transcends politics and preaching.” The moralism and “high-minded indignation” found in other films about the Iraq war are nonexistent here, said A.O. Scott in The New York Times. Peirce runs Stop-Loss on “earthier fuel: sweat, blood, beer, testosterone, loud music, and an ideologically indeterminate, freewheeling sense of rage.” The issues are certainly important, and Peirce’s intentions are good, said Stephanie Zacharek in Salon.com. But by keeping the audience a “safe distance” from the actual war, the director makes us feel removed from the heart of the problem.