Documentary
The Hornet's Nest, an assembly by directors David Salzberg and Christian Tureaud of video shot by Mike and Carlos Boettcher, shows us soldiers under fire and losing comrades. The father-and-son war correspondents were embedded with U.S Army and Marine elements in Afghanistan in 2011. You watch shaky helmet-cam footage and hear bullets whistling by. While the material captured is extraordinary, it's too often presented in prosaic reality-TV style: A generic suspense-film score makes already tense scenes — as when soldiers try to determine whether an assembly of pipes and wires is simply a jury-rigged source of electricity for a rural home or an improvised explosive device — feel less grave than they really are. It's a disservice to the Boettchers' remarkable reporting.