Green Zone/Jarhead/The Kingdom

Triple-bill of modern US war films. In the Iraq War thriller 'Green Zone' (2010) Matt Damon stars as Chief Army Warrant Officer Roy Miller, a specialist soldier who joins forces with Wall Street reporter Lawrie Dayne (Amy Ryan) to expose the hotbed of covert and faulty intelligence surrounding the search for Iraq's cache of weapons of mass destruction.

Greg Kinnear and Brendan Gleeson co-star. In 'Jarhead' (2005), an adaptation of former Marine Anthony Swofford's Gulf War memoir, young recruit Swofford (Jake Gyllenhaal) joins up with the US Marines (nicknamed 'Jarheads' because of their distinctive haircuts) on the eve of the 1990 Gulf War.

After a brutal spell in boot camp, during which Swofford and his fellow recruits are systematically geared up for the conflict, the Marines are dispatched to the deserts of the Persian Gulf to take part in a war that sees them required to do very little in the way of fighting.

Bored and frustrated in the middle of nowhere, the young soldiers resort to a macabre sense of humour as they wait for the war to happen to them.

Finally, in 'The Kingdom' (2007), when a terrorist bomb detonates inside a Western housing compound in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, an international incident is ignited.

While diplomats slowly debate equations of territorialism, FBI Special Agent Ronald Fleury (Jamie Foxx) quickly assembles an elite team and negotiates a secret five-day trip into Saudi Arabia to locate the madman behind the bombing.

Upon landing in the desert kingdom, however, Fleury and his team discover Saudi authorities suspicious and unwelcoming of American interlopers into what they consider a local matter.

Hamstrung by protocol, and with the clock ticking on their five days, the FBI agents find their expertise worthless without the trust of their Saudi counterparts who want to locate the terrorist in their homeland on their own terms.