Just a gal and her dog. And bombs. Gabriella Cowperthwaite's moving film, MEGAN LEAVEY

One of the strengths -- there are a lot of them, along with a few weaknesses -- of the new film MEGAN LEAVEY, directed by Gabriella Cowperthwaite (of Blackfish fame) and written by Pamela Gray, Annie Mumolo and Tim Lovestedt is that it refuses to turn the character of its titular Ms Leavey into anything approaching the typical movie bio-pic "wonderful-person" heroine. Megan is clearly a problemed young woman who has major trouble with what we might call just plain socialization. Her "people" skills are greatly wanting, probably due to that usual combo of nature and nurture. In fact, it seems that she joins the U.S. military because it just might prove pretty much the only way out of her currently dead-end life.

As written by that above trio of screenwriters and directed by Ms Cowperthwaite (shown at left), the movie never sugar-coats Megan's lack of social skills. We're not even certain, by film's end, that she has gained much more of these, other than her newfound and terrific ability in handling military dogs.

And yet we're with this young woman -- hoping for her, even as we wince at her mistakes -- all the way. This is due to the filmmakers' skill at showing us various situations in which Megan finds herself, along with the difficult, if typical, ways in which she tries to extricate herself. Usually with negative results. We feel her pain and understand her anger, even if we also wish she could learn how to control/use it more wisely.

All this is due as much to the rich and rounded, warts-and-more-warts performance from actress Kate Mara (above, front and center) in the title role. Ms Mara keeps us with her at every moment, never more so than when, finally, she begins bonding with those military dogs and slowly discovers the one area in which she truly excels -- below -- training those dogs to sniff out possible IEDs in our still current and probably for-fucking-ever middle east wars and then remaining smart and intuitive enough to understand and interpret the dogs in action.

Ms Mara, Ms Cowperthwaite, and her crew do a bang-up job of all this, in particular one lengthy, sustained scene in which Leavey and her dog do that good work, are hit and injured for their trouble, and then keep on doing more of the work immediately after. Though Leavey and her dog(s) were responsible for many "saves" during her time "in country," this single scene is all we need to understand what her work entails and why it was so important.

Cowperthwaite is not known as an action director, but she certainly proves to be one here, and the scene is as good as anything in the recent The Wall, or any other of our middle-east war movies I can readily recall. Suspense, surprise, shock, action, drama -- the director gets it all. (Along the way, she, her writers and Mara even give us a little humor now and then to interrupt the unpleasantness at hand.)

We also get a little "family" time, during which Edie Falco (above, left) plays Megan's controlling and generally selfish mom, and Will Patton her disliked step-dad. A particularly good performance comes from Common, shown below, who proves anything but in the role of Leavy's strong, stern and caring commanding officer, Gunny Martin.

Love interest is provided by Ramon Rodriguez (below), and although he and Mara work well together and never have a dishonest moment, this part of the film seems somewhat "inserted" to provide a bit more popular appeal and to further "humanize" our girl.

No matter. What I have not yet mentioned and what is most true of this film is that it's an "animal movie" (as was Blackfish), in particular a dog story -- so animals lovers will cream and kvell at the goings-on. Deservedly. Cowperthwaite never tries to jerk those tears. There's no need. They'll come unbidden and of their own accord because of the tale told and the outcome here.

Opening wide this Friday, June 9, Megan Leavey , running just short of two hours, may prove the most successful of all the movies released so far by the little distributor Bleecker Street. It's certainly opening at the most theaters I've seen from this distributor. And why not? It's patriotic and pro-military without being stupidly "America first," animals lovers will embrace it, it's feminist without pushing things, and it's an excellent character study, too -- of a woman who can't/won't fit in and then, finally, does.

Wherever you are across the USA, to view/find the theater(s) nearest you, simply click here. In South Florida, the movie will be opening on oodles of screens, including AMC's Sunset Place 24, Hialeah 12, Aventura Mall 24, Tamiami 18, Pompano Beach 18, City Place 20, St Lucie 14, Indian River 24; at Cobb's Hialeah Grand 18 and Miami Lakes 17; at CMX Brickell City Center 10; at Silverspot Coconut Creek Cinemas; at CFB Majestic 11; at Cinemark Palace 20 and Paradise 24; at Flagship Cinemas 14; at Paragon Ridge Plaza 8 and Wellington 10; at REGAL's Magnolia Place 16, Cypress Creek Station 16, The Falls 12, Oakwood 18, Kendall Village Stadium 16, Westfork 13, Treasure Coast Mall 16, Broward Stadium 12, Shadowood 16, Southland Mall Stadium 16, Royal Palm Beach 18, Sawgrass 23, Wellington Cinema 8, and South Beach 18; and at the Regency Cinema 8 in Stuart.

QUEEN AND COUNTRY: His current retrospective ends, and the new John Boorman film arrives

There are but a few days left to see on the big screen at New York City's Film Forum a selection of the work of British filmmaker John Boorman, an auteur whose films are always worth seeing (often the least regarded of which -- Zardoz, The Tiger's Tail -- offer the most surprising rewards). One of Boorman's most popular films, and the one that brought him the largest arthouse acclaim, as well as a bunch of Oscar nominations and BAFTA awards (Deliverance brought him his first batch of Oscar noms and mainstream popularity), was 1987's Hope and Glory. Now, nearly three decades later, arrives the sequel-of-sorts to that earlier biographical film that covered the filmmaker's days as a child during World War II. This new one, QUEEN AND COUNTRY, tackles the character's young manhood in the British military during the Korean War.

What a pleasure and a joy this new film is! Wonderfully funny, gorgeous to view (the period details are scrumptious and on-mark) and finally quite moving, too, Queen and Country proves there is still immense life and talent to this now 82-year-old filmmaker. The love -- of family, of country (with an often ironic and telling eye) and of the men and women in his life -- that Mr. Boorman (shown at right) conjures here is likely to find a hugely empathetic audience in English-speaking countries, surely, and perhaps far beyond those borders, as well.

Utterly accessible yet absolutely specific in its grasp of details concerning time, place and person, the movie's great achievement -- as is so often Boorman's too -- lies in how it shows us life in its rich comic/sad complexities and its characters as complicated and problemed people who are sometimes simply impossible to set right.

The filmmaker's beautiful tapestry includes his stand-in, Bill Rohan, wonderfully played by Callum Turner (above) and his best pal Percy Hapgood (a firecracker performance by Caleb Landry Jones, below).

Around these two revolve the rest of the wonderful cast of oddball, important characters -- from the beautiful, troubled young woman Bill encounters one evening at a concert (Tamsin Egerton, below)

to the discipline-crazed officer and bête noire of the boys, Sgt. Major Bradley (David Thewlis, below center, in yet another of his amazing, scary and deeply-felt performances)

to the no-one-does-more-with-less Richard E. Grant (below) as the superior officer, Major Cross

and a simply terrific performance from Pat Shortt (below), as the company's supreme grifter, Redmond, a role that even Phil Silvers' Sergeant Bilko might envy.

Add to this a first-class (though not upper class) funny and disparate family for Bill, and you have the makings of a hugely memorable hit that should delight arthouse audiences (perhaps into repeated viewings) before moving into even some mainstream venues, too.

The scene of that family (and friend) watching the coronation of the current Queen Elizabeth on their new television set -- a similar scene occurred in the little-seen (you really ought to) but excellent remake of The Scapegoat -- and who they suddenly see in the background provides yet another surprising twist and jolt to this splendid movie.

How it all comes together -- anything but perfectly, but believably and with a fine mixture of revelation and rue -- makes for one of the year's loveliest movie gifts. And one that just might find itself in memory when it comes time for next year's flock of awards-giving. (The movie ends, by the way, with a perfectly delightful nod to the career that will come.)

Meanwhile, Queen and Country -- via BBC Worldwide North America and running a never-too-lengthy 115 minutes -- gets its U.S. theatrical premiere this Wednesday, February 18, at NYC's Film Forum and in Los Angeles the following Friday, February 27 at Laemmle's Royal, Playhouse 7 and Town Center 5. In the weeks to come the film will open across the country in most major cities. To see the entire list of playdates, with cities and theaters, simply click here.  (To view the schedule for the remaining Boorman films in the current Film Forum retrospective, click here.)

MIS: Human Secret Weapon--Junichi Suzuki offers an eloquent, surprising documentary

MIS stands for Military Intelligence Service, which, during World War II, was secretly formed by the U.S. Army to train and then use second-generation Japanese- Americans (known as Nisei) to help us win the war against Japan. We've seen over the years documentaries and narrative films about the internment camps, into which Japanese-American citizens were suddenly tossed after Pearl Harbor. But the new documentary, MIS: HUMAN SECRET WEAPON, directed by Junichi Suzuki (shown below), is the first TrustMovies has seen (or even heard about) that covers this military operation.

One of the most moving and surprising segments comes early on, as a now very aged former MIS member speaks about those times. Then we hear from his Caucasian son-in-law, who tries to explain to us what the old man means. The son-in-law shows us how, to this day, his father-in-law is affected by the racism of that time, which still informs what he says and how he thinks, speaks and feels about himself. Hearing the anecdotes told by these old men about their service to the USA makes it clear how much our country owed them in terms of winning that war. Even at the time, our military estimated that two years were knocked off the fight due to the MIS -- who comprised a force of approximately 3,000 during the war and another 2,000 post-war, whose job it was to help Japan back into some kind of normalcy (and this, after Hiroshima and Nagasaki).

The MIS did so many different things, with its ability to communicate in Japanese a primary force in helping our military understand the strength of its adversary and what its goals, immediate and longer-term, might be. The ex-MIS men tell of questioning the Japanese POWs (below), and their stories reveal irony and heartbreak. Hearing these men today, while seeing photos of them as young men is both enthralling and sad.

There is even a little humor now and again -- particularly keen in the tale of how the Japanese soldiers used the leaflets dropped from the air which told the men that, if they surrendered, no harm would come to them. The stories that come out of the occupation of and battle for Okinawa (below) are among the film's most poignant.

We see an interesting glimpse, too, of post-war Japan, and how in the first democratic election held there, Japanese women were able to vote for the first time. The movie ends by telling us of those Nisei who were especially conflicted by their actions, experiences and memories of the war -- having in some cases returned to a country where they had close relatives, only to make war on it. Nonetheless, and despite the enormous prejudices of that time (some of which remain today), the were no cases of MIS soldiers going AWOL during the entire war.

MIS: Human Secret Weapon (100 minutes, distributed via UTB 18.2) opens today, April 6, in New York City (Quad Cinema) and Los Angeles (Laemmle's NoHo 7). Click here to see all currently scheduled theatrical showings of the film.

Liza Johnson's RETURN: a quiet, slow-burning, post-war movie that pays off

We've seen the subject of RETURN -- veterans of our current follies in Iraq and Afghanistan coming back to post-war life in America -- handled a number of times previously, usually in documen-tary form and dealing, as most war and post-war movies do, with men rather than women. This new film from first-time, full-length writer/director Liza Johnson focuses on a woman solider, Kelli, played with expanding ferment and confusion by a very good Linda Cardelini, who returns home to job, husband and family -- to discover that everything has changed because she has changed, in ways that she can't understand, explain or even do much about.

This last point is the key to understanding and appreciating Return, TrustMovies believes, and it is to the credit of filmmaker Johnson, shown at right, that she never pushes this view down our throats. We have to come to it slowly, as we watch the story unfold and the character of Kelli disintegrate. Why is this happening? No definitive explanation is given but it becomes clear that some sort of post-traumatic stress is taking its toll. From so much that Americans have already been told about these current wars and their effect on returning vets, we know that PST exhibits itself in varied ways. When gender is included in the mix, the variation is even greater, I should think.

Last year, as part of the excellent festival of new British independent films brought to the USA by Emerging Pictures, one of the films, In Our Name (click and scroll down), dealt with the PTS melt-down of a young wife and mother (Joanne Froggatt, above, right, of Downton Abbey) who comes back from the same war, in which Britian, as one of the Coalition of the Willing, stupidly served. This film, harder-hitting but a bit more melodramatic, makes a most interesting Brit version of Return -- in which a problematic husband, alcohol, a bad economy and PTS join forces in a destructive spiral.

What makes Return as special as it is, is the commendable performance from Ms Cardellini (above) that never begs for sympathy, coupled to the restraint that filmmaker Johnson shows in refusing to enumerate the inner problems Kelli experiences. Instead, both give us sidelong glances as the problems crop up: having trouble coupling to and with her husband (Michael Shannon, shown below, who's good here, as usual, but in a less large and showy role), adjusting to what now seems like pointless manual labor at her employment, and simply feeling lost in all the "real" life all around her.

As the movie proceeds, we slowly derive an understanding of what it must be like for these returnees, who come back to us changed in ways that they cannot fathom, and that only slowly emerge. What to do? Group therapy, as shown here, cannot begin to help. John Slattery (below), of Mad Men, appears briefly as a member of the support group who reaches out a drug-filled helping-hand to co-member Kelli. "What happened over there?" Kelli is asked several times during the course of the film. "I had it better than most" is the only "explanation" she is able to muster.

What we're left with is genuinely, rightfully, hugely depressing: the walking wounded coming back to a society that doesn't want them and pretends that they're either OK or not there, ignoring them to its peril. In past wars cannon fodder knew enough to die and feed the worms. In our new wars, they return to haunt us in perpetuity, enacting a kind of self- and societal-destruction that is perhaps as inevitable as it is unjust. (Our leaders are the ones who should be suffering; as ever, they simply grow more wealthy.)

Return is a wake-up call, to be sure. And as usual with any film that has to do with our current wartime situation, it is just as sure to be ignored. (After all, we have to have our big, costly parade for real heroes like the Super Bowl-winning NY Giants.) In any case, the film opens this Friday, February 10, here in New York City at the Village East Cinema, at IndieScreen in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, and at the Downing Film Center in Newburgh, New York; in the Los Angeles area, it opens, same date, at the Laemmle Monica 4-Plex. Click here for further upcoming playdates and venues.