Fifty Dead Men Walking

Forget the blockbusters. The most exciting movie of the summer is not Public Enemies or Terminator Salvation or The Taking of Pelham 1 2 3. It’s a tough little film called The Hurt Locker, Kathyrn Bigelow’s nail-biting thriller about an American bomb disposal squad in Baghdad. Strangely, there are still very few female directors making mainstream movies, and the number of women directing films about war and terrorism is even more scarce. And yet, along comes another one—Fifty Dead Men Walking, which opens July 31.

Like The Hurt Locker, Fifty Dead Men Walking is a gritty suspense drama about a group of men who become walking targets in the chaos of urban guerrilla warfare, where battles are fought in residential neighbourhoods and no one can be trusted. It too is directed by a middle-aged woman, Ottawa-born filmmaker Kari Skogland. Her previous movie was The Stone Angel, an earnest adaptation of Margaret Laurence’s CanLit classic. But in watching the taut, visceral drama—starring Jim Sturgess as an IRA informant and Ben Kingsley as the British cop who recruits him—you’d never guess that this U.K. co-production is a Canadian movie, or that its director is a woman.