From Vietnam to the Iraq War, Hollywood has struggled to find the appropriate way to depict ongoing wars, typically taking years, if not decades, to put the proper perspective on modern political quagmires.
In the case of such conflicts as the Arab Spring and the Syrian civil war — front and center in “A Private War” — the challenge is further complicated by Western forces being all but absent from the scene, making it difficult for American filmmakers to find fellow American heroes to shadow into that particular heart of darkness.In his commitment to capturing the ongoing Syrian crisis, “City of Ghosts” director Matthew Heineman takes the next most logical route, building an incredibly sophisticated, psychologically immersive film around late real-life war correspondent Marie Colvin, the rock-star Sunday Times reporter fictionalized earlier this year in “Girls of the Sun,” and ferociously embodied here by Rosamund Pike.
Best known as the porcelain sociopath in “Gone Girl,
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