Nick Broomfield showed with the slow-burning Ghosts that he’s as adept with narrative cinema as with documentary. Battle For Haditha is no match for Ghosts as a piece of filmmaking, but it does have a far more headline-worthy plot.
It chronicles the massacre of 24 Iraqis at the hands of US Marines in an apparently misguided retaliation for a deadly bomb. Broomfield pulls gripping performances from an unknown cast, but there are times where it seems particularly questionable that Broomfield could know what happened in the scenes he’s depicting. It’s a powerful movie, but one blighted by a sense that it’s hard to know how much to trust.