Jarhead

Jarhead (2005) is Sam Mendes's Gulf War drama you can watch online on iFILM. Marine sniper Anthony Swofford ships out to the Saudi desert hungry for combat that refuses to arrive.

Jake Gyllenhaal plays Swofford; Peter Sarsgaard is his spotter Troy, and Jamie Foxx is Staff Sergeant Sykes, the lifer who keeps the unit together. Adapted from Swofford's own memoir, the movie skips the firefights you expect from the genre. What it gives you instead: heat, boredom, sand, and a young man slowly unravelling while he waits months for an order to shoot that may never come. Letters from home stop arriving. The mind starts to go.

Fresh off his Oscar for American Beauty, Mendes shot a war film about waiting rather than winning, with cinematographer Roger Deakins turning Kuwait's burning oil fields into images you don't forget. Stream Jarhead (2005) online on iFILM.