A terrific film about the Afghan war and toll it takes on soldiers and others

Tobias Lindholm's 2015 film, A War, a fine, provocative, intelligent film and it makes a great pairing w/ his previous excellent film, A Hijacking - many of of the same actors, appearing in both films, suggests that Lindholm may be developing a real ensemble, as his fellow Scandinavian Bergman did in the 60s. A War is about a Danish platoon engaged in peacekeeping in a remote section of Afghanistan, and we focus on a small group of soldiers - movie starts out w/ a # of the foot-soldiers on patrol, one steps on an IED and is blown up: this entire scene seems as vivid as any documentary account of war. The after-effect is that the patrol leader is shell shocked so the platoon leader - the main character in the movie - decides to set an example and leads patrols for several weeks. Without going into detail so as not to spoil anything, in a very tense scene in which the patrol is under heavy attack - Claus - makes a quick decision that saves lives - and costs lives - and a military tribunal investigates. The movie moves back and forth very comfortably between Claus's life at war and his wife home in what I guess is Copenhagen w/ 3 young children. In this, A War replicates A Hijacking, which also moved back and forth, in that case between crew mates on a ship overtaken by Somali pirates and the corporate owner of the ship wrestling with a slew of moral decisions about negotiating the release of the crew. Though A War is almost unrivaled in the immediacy of its war footage and in the examination of the personal pressure and anguish of nonprofessional soldiers seemingly doing relatively short stints, A Hijacking has an edge - in that the moral decisions on the home front were an unsolvable dilemma, we as viewers felt the anguish of the CEO trying to figure out how much to give and when or if to give in to the hijackers' demands - there were no easy or obvious answers; in this film, A War, there's really no moral dilemma, and we're pretty much united in believing in Claus's innocence and only hoping the military tribunal will concur.