The Hurt Locker does the impossible: It single-handedly redeems the mostly misbegotten run of “sand” films, those war-on-terror features connected to Iraq and Afghanistan, a genre about as useless and debased as those feel-good romantic comedies where Kate Hudson sings into a hairbrush, makes goo-goo eyes at Gerard Butler, and throws a hunk of wedding cake at Anne Hathaway. Note I said “features”; there have been excellent documentaries about our ongoing engagements, and the filmmakers wisely take their cues from those.

Hollywood was slow to react to Vietnam. The first major films about the war, The Deer Hunter and Apocalypse Now, were mirages, with abstract themes, that came after the fighting had ended; it wasn’t until the ’80s when more concrete movies, like Platoon, appeared. The apparatus may have been too fast to react to our post-9/11 reality, flooding a trickle of audiences with well-intentioned but suffocating liberal hand-wringing — earlier this year Cinemax must have had its lowest ratings ever when it programmed, back-to-back, the flops In the Valley of Elah (forget the subject; who the hell would see a movie called In the Valley of Elah?) and Rendition. The few attempts to actually engage an audience, like The Kingdom, swapped the lectures for action movie clichés, an unsatisfying trade.

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