Review: Lebanon (15) ****

The metal coffin in question is part of Israel's incursion into Lebanon in June 1982. Inside, a few nervous men attempt to find a route through the confusion, madness, death and destruction. They have only one shared collective thought: to survive.

Samuel Maoz's white-knuckle autobiographical drama rumbles forth as the king of the tank movie – admittedly a compact and bijou genre but one that has thrown up some impressive portraits of men in war.

Described as a hybrid of Waltz with Bashir and Wolfgang Petersen's Das Boot, Lebanon more accurately resembles an amalgam of Sam Fuller's The Big Red One and Kevin Reynolds's The Beast of War. It focuses on ordinary young men forced to accept orders and direction from officers and NCOs in whom they have neither confidence

nor faith.

Maoz presents this raw and unflinching episode in almost theatrical fashion, utilising the interior of the tank like a stage set and embracing it as another character. He is careful to avoid caricatures, but one wonders how closely the various conscripts are modelled on his own former comrades and whether his own behaviours have been airbrushed to depict him (or the character based upon him) in a quasi-favourable light.

Lebanon lurches from one hoarse note of near-panic to the next. A town is stormed, guerrilla fighters attacked and a family almost wiped out. A sole female survivor staggers, barely clothed, from the wreckage of her home to be greeted by trigger-happy troops terrified that she may be a suicide bomber.

When an enemy soldier is captured, he is taunted by a Christian Phalangist, an Israeli ally. His whispered threats provide arguably the most dreadful moments, seemingly underlining Maoz's message that, in war, men abandon their humanity. With scenes of warfare witnessed almost exclusively through a gun turret periscope, Lebanon emerges as a key modern war film that offers hints at the casual atrocities that occur.