Topical war film feeds off and into the widespread cynicism, which is to say the widespread enlightenment, as to the motives behind the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003. Matt Damon, maturing into an actor of spartan economy and vigilant interiority, plays the army officer charged with running down the leads to the WMDs, very soon reversing his course (“The intel’s no good”) and independently running down the source of those leads: “Jesus Christ! This is the reason we went to war!” Director Paul Greengrass, as he has done both in docudramas (Bloody Sunday, United 93) and in cloak-and-dagger daydreams (The Bourne Supremacy, The Bourne Ultimatum), cultivates an air of reality through a grainy washed-out image and a zigging and zagging camera that covers for any inauthenticity by never giving us a good look at what we’re looking at. It cannot cover, however, for screenwriter Brian Helgeland’s penchant for the instructive, reductive talking point (“This country is a powder keg of ethnic instability”) that sounds like nothing anyone would say outside a panel of experts under severe commercial time constraints on CNN. Any deficiencies in the image or the dialogue will not detract from the pell-mell propulsiveness of the action, mostly contained within a single hectic day, the sheer breathless pace of it and the distance over which that pace is sustained. The relentlessly chugging music doesn’t really seem to help with that, but apparently can’t help itself. Greg Kinnear, Amy Ryan, Brendan Gleeson, Khalid Abdalla. (2010) — Duncan Shepherd