Whether it's Mel Gibson all twanged up as a battle-hardened Vietnam War hero in We Were Soldiers; Bruce Willis leading his men over the wire of a prisoner camp in Hart's War or the slack-jawed CGI slickness of Jerry Bruckheimer's Pearl Harbor, there's no question the war movie is back in vogue in a big way.

But as bloody or breathtaking or heroic as these gussied-up Hollywood depictions of armed human conflict might try to be, none of them capture the true hellacious chaos of war like Israeli director Amos Gitai's Kippur, playing tonight and tomorrow at the Metro Cinema as part of the Local Heroes International Film Festival's Contemporary Israeli Cinema program.
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War is hell and what else is new? In Israeli filmmaker Amos Gitai's semi-autobiographical Kippur, we get a measure of one man's vision of that hell in his homeland.

In a surprise attack timed to the Jewish high holiday of Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, on Oct. 6, 1973, Egyptian and Syrian forces invade Israel. This war would become a brief but tragic conflict with 12,600 people dead and almost 28,000 wounded on both sides. No one gained anything from it.
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