Beaufort

After 18 years dug into a heavily fortified mountain deep in occupied Lebanon, the last Israeli soldiers enduring constant bombardment at the site of the ancient crusader stronghold called Beaufort receive orders to abandon their posts, detonate the warren of bunkers in which they’ve tenuously clung to life and victory, and come home. Amid redoubled shelling from Hezbollah, the forts brash, impossibly young commander Liraz (Oshri Cohen) struggles to keep himself and his men safe from a faceless enemy that would turn withdrawal into massacre, and transform a just cause into a lost cause. An unusually dexterous ensemble cast and director Joseph Cedar’s (MJFF 2001 film Time of Favor) visionary combination of gritty objectivity, lucid sudden violence, and keen sensitivity to the tangle of terror, duty, and sacrifice common to soldiers of any era, results in a film so realistic, so intense, it verges on the surreal. Suspenseful, poetic, and heartbreakingly transcendent, the Academy Award-nominated Beaufort is a movie of tremendous power and one of those once-in-a-decade war pictures that reminds us what's worthwhile about putting the ritualized barbarism of combat onscreen in the first place.