Hondros

Chris Hondros sought to reconcile peerless beauty with unfathomable atrocity, and Greg Campbell’s film follows suit.

Journalists are being targeted in combat zones around the world. Hondros highlights that danger and brings out the humanity in a career that was above and beyond the stereotypes of their profession.

In an era when the propaganda machines of conflicts like Syria are imperiling photojournalists’ work all the more, Campbell’s homage to his friend is a thorough look at a straight shooter.

Because of that private connection, Hondros is definitely a personal documentary, with the loss and pain Campbell is still experiencing taking center stage more often than might be ideal. But that connection also leads to some detours that might not have happened otherwise, sequences that show what made Hondros special as a photographer and a person.

If the movie doesn’t go more than skin deep in interrogating questions about interventions both military and journalistic into the Middle East, it does succeed in opening up Mr. Hondros’s contradiction-filled world.