Lions for Lambs

Lions for Lambs unfolds in three locations at once, with the action playing out in roughly real time. In Washington, a Republican senator with presidential ambitions grants a lengthy interview to a seasoned television journalist, using the conversation to lay out his plan for the war in Afghanistan. On the West Coast, an idealistic political science professor tries to pull a disengaged student back into his studies, pointing to two former students who enlisted. Those two men are meanwhile trapped on a snowy Afghan ridge after an ambush, waiting for rescue as Taliban fighters close in. The three threads are bound together by the question of how political decisions made far from the battlefield affect the people sent to fight.

Robert Redford directed the film, the seventh in the chronological list of his directing credits, and appears as the professor. Matthew Michael Carnahan wrote the screenplay and produced alongside Redford and Tracy Falco. The cast includes Meryl Streep as the journalist, Tom Cruise as the senator, Andrew Garfield as the student, and Michael Peña and Derek Luke as the two soldiers. The production cost about 35 million dollars and took in roughly 65 million worldwide. On IMDb it holds a 6 out of 10 from around 870 votes, while its critics' rating stands at 4.8 out of 10 from 183 reviews, a wider gap than the audience score alone would suggest.