Addition

Last night, the Ministry of Defence confirmed that 3 more British soldiers died in a suicide attack in southern Afghanistan bringing the total dead in that country to 100. In The Valley of Elah (out on DVD and Blu-ray) starts as a slow burn murder mystery that evolves into a moral mystery as Hank Deerfield (Tommy Lee Jones), a former military MP, doggedly pursues the cause of his son’s death – a recently returned soldier from Iraq. Based on the true story of Richard Davis(who returned with Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder), this is a deeply moving and incredibly brave film for Academy Award® winning Crash writer/director Paul Haggis and his cast. The title derives from the story Hank tells the young child of Emily Sanders (Charlize Theron), a police detective slowly roped into helping with the investigation. The Israelites were on one mountain and the Philistines with Goliath on the other, the Valley of Elah below: “the first thing David had to fight was his own fear”. “What happens when they [the soldiers in Iraq find out that they’re] not David but the Goliath?” asks Haggis in the interview extra. No one would touch the idea in Hollywood until Clint Eastwood put in a word at Warners. They’ve been so many ‘Iraq’ films by now, but this one will really haunt your thoughts as there are no histrionics only characters who begin their journey, like most ordinary citizens, in a state of thinking they know where they are with the war only to be thrust into a far deeper plane of rage and understanding. The ending is so unbelievably brave for an American film let alone one released by a studio and made all the more poignant as Annie Lennox’s song Lost plays out.

And this weekend's Financial Times has an article on the 9/11 conspiracy theories:
The Truth Is Out There - Part I