An Old Fashioned Take On Today S Armed Forces And The Rest Of This Week S Movies

• Lone Survivor

In the movie section of this week’s Reader, we spotlight three high-profile new releases: the star-studded movie version of Tracy Letts’s play August: Osage County; The Past, the French-language debut of Iranian filmmaker Asghar Farhadi (A Separation); and Lone Survivor, Peter Berg’s dramatization of a 2005 Navy SEAL mission in Afghanistan. Survivor is the subject of this week’s long review, which argues that Berg’s depiction of the U.S. armed forces has more in common with Hollywood war movies of the 1940s than with most war movies of the past 30 years.