Black Hawk Down (2001)

You will not be able to tell most of these soldiers apart, and the movie seems mostly fine with that. Once the helmets go on, Josh Hartnett, Ewan McGregor, Eric Bana and a dozen other faces blur into one dusty unit, and Ridley Scott keeps the camera so close you lose track of who is where. That might be the point. Black Hawk Down covers the October 1993 mission in Mogadishu, and it spends nearly all of its 144 minutes inside the chaos, with no speeches to let you catch your breath. It is loud, exhausting and very hard to look away from. The bigger problem is that the Somali side of the story is mostly crowds and gunfire, with almost no faces or voices of its own, so the film only tells half of what happened that day. A 7.0 because the filmmaking is relentless and honest about how fast a plan can fall apart, and the people get lost inside it. $467 says the room stays quiet for a while after the credits start.

What works: Ridley Scott makes the confusion and the noise feel real, and the film never turns the soldiers into action movie heroes.

What doesn’t: The soldiers are nearly impossible to tell apart, and the Somali people caught in the fighting barely get a face or a voice.

Who it’s for: Viewers who want a serious, unglamorous look at a real military operation and can handle a tense, loud watch.