Flags of Our Fathers

There were five Marines and one Navy Corpsman photographed raising the U.S. flag on Mt. Suribachi by Joe Rosenthal on February 23, 1945. This is the story of three of the six surviving servicemen - John 'Doc' Bradley, Pvt. Rene Gagnon and Pvt. Ira Hayes - who fought in the battle to take Iwo Jima from the Japanese.

Eastwood's WWII meditation earned broadly favorable notices for its structural ambition — interweaving the brutal combat at Iwo Jima with a corrosive look at how the government packaged the flag-raising photograph into a war-bonds propaganda machine. Critics generally admired its moral seriousness, though the Wikipedia source preserves almost exclusively positive voices, leaving the minority reservations that kept it short of universal acclaim largely unspoken.