L'ennemi intime

It could be set during the war in Iraq, but the brutal French film Intimate Enemies takes place in 1959, at the height of the Algerian struggle against French rule.

Visceral and engrossing.

While following a fairly predictable story line, the film has enough ambushes, treachery and irony to sustain audience involvement with a range of characters that stand for diverse points of view about that war.

The movie goes flat, though, when Mr. Siri and his co-writer, Patrick Rotman, shift their attention from the action to the moral math of guerrilla warfare.

Conventional as the film may be, the two leads are quite adept, and director Florent Emilio Siri proves to have an exquisite eye for battlefield tableaux.

With its sententious air of historical reckoning, Enemies is an impressive monument, but not a moving one.