In June 2014, the Iraqi city of Mosul fell to Isis (also known as Daesh or the Islamic State).
A joint-forces campaign to reclaim it began two years later and ended with the re-establishment of Iraqi control of the devastated, decimated city in July 2017.
Matthew Michael Carnahan (brother of Joe and screenwriter of “The Kingdom” and “Deepwater Horizon”) picks through the debris of that campaign of barely two years ago for his directorial debut, “Mosul,” a well-made but troublingly generic war-is-hell pulse-pounder that inevitably prompts the question: How recent is too recent when it comes to turning a theater of war into pure theater, pure Hollywood spectacle?The past is supposed to be another country, but 2017 feels barely an exploding city block behind us.
And most of us can probably still recall that part of the horror of the Mosul campaign, which was described in vivid detail in a 2017 New Yorker article by Luke Mogelson,
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