Brian De Palma's paradoxical take on the occupation of Iraq is as blatant as an open sore yet swathed in layers of formalist irony. The film depicts members of a U.S. military patrol as blunt caricatures in an old-school morality play: Two soldiers rape an Iraqi girl and murder her family while others are too busy wrestling with their consciences to intervene. Though the story is adapted from a real-life incident, it is also a restaging of De Palma's Vietnam film Casualties of War, and the bilious tone of the proceedings may reflect the director's frustration with having previously crafted a war movie that, while cinematically dazzling and entertaining, was ineffective in preventing history from repeating itself. Perhaps borne from this frustration, Redacted is a multivalent inquiry into how this current war is being told, and by whom, at times denying the viewer conventional movie gratification if only to engage them elsewhere.