Green Zone – Dir Paul Greengrass, starring Matt Damon, Greg Kinnear, Amy Ryan, Brendan Gleeson

Chief warrant officer Roy Miller (Damon) is a military officer charged with locating weapons of mass destruction, but every site he visits is a dead end. When he voices doubts about the intelligence, he gets in trouble with the Pentagon chief (Kinnear). Meanwhile, the CIA director (Gleeson) is sympathetic, and encourages him to dig around. So with the help of a local translator, Miller dives in. And he's quickly caught between two factions in his own government as he searches for an Iraqi general in hiding.

Directed by Paul Greengrass and starring his Bourne leading man, it’s not hard to see why Green Zone has been dubbed ‘Bourne in Iraq’ but in reality this is a misnomer. There is really only one proper action sequence in the film – albeit a thrillingly intense one – and it comes late in the film; for the most part it is closer in spirit to a classic 70’s conspiracy thriller.

Green Zone is intelligent, tough and gripping. It may not be perfect but as a pulse-pounding thriller, it’s a knockout.