The conflict has cut some locals off from their families back home since November.

“The people are the city!” That line appears just once in Shakespeare’s play detailing the rise and fall of fifth-century B.C. Roman war hero and politician Caius Martius Coriolanus (Ralph Fiennes), just as public opinion is turning ugly towards him and his anti-populist attitudes. Ralph Fiennes makes his debut as a director in an adaptation of that play, and in his and screenwriter John Logan’s version, set in modern times, that line becomes a rallying cry for the people who oppose Coriolanus in his bid to follow military success with a run at becoming a Roman consul.

A new sign on the Key Bridge welcoming drivers to the District was vandalized over the weekend, treating commuters to an anti-war message this morning.

Decades ago, United States armed forces were shipped off to southeast Asia to fight in a jungle war against an enemy that used guerrilla tactics, in a conflict that was meant to finally liberate a population recently divested of a European occupying force, but as yet unused to democracy. Opinion back home was mixed, and prominent figures in the media called the whole affair a “quagmire”. No, not that conflict. Keep going a few more decades back.

Narrative movies about war can be harrowing to watch, but it’s easy to remind yourself that when the scene cuts, the actors go back to their trailers. Documentaries about war, while taking place in reality, rarely have the in-the-trenches gut-punch affect that draws us into their narrative counterparts. And then there’s Restrepo. Filmed over the course of a full 14-month deployment of a single Army platoon in Afghanistan by journalists Sebastian Junger and Tim…

Photo by Bullneck We had to read through this article from Canadian newspaper The Globe and Mail three times before we decided it wasn’t necessarily an elaborate prank. According to reporter Paul Koring, it seems that during a two-day military conference set to convene at the Embassy of Canada in Washington Sept. 23-24, Canadian officials plan to stage a mock Afghan village in the courtyard of the embassy, in which they will set off…

Fidelis Cloer takes aim at competition seen and unseen in Bulletproof Salesman. “I want war. I don’t want peace,” says German armored-car merchant Fidelis Cloer at the beginning of Bulletproof Salesman. An hour later, in the doc’s final moments, he offers a slightly more nuanced view, pointing out that he did nothing at all to instigate or sustain the protracted conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan than have proved such a windfall for his company….

K Street, Tuesday, 5:41 p.m., photo by llunardi2 The Post is reporting that participants in today’s Iraq war protests were disappointed by the turnout. What did you see? Here’s some of the images that have already been uploaded to the DCist Flickr Pool. 17th Street, Wednesday, 8:44 a.m., photo by Fredo Alvarez 17th Street, Wednesday, 8:42 a.m., photo by Fredo Alvarez…

In addition to the long list of anti-war protests planned throughout the city today (we’ll have some photos up from some of them later on), around 200 activists staged a “Freeze-In” protest at Union Station on Tuesday. In the video above, you can see several dozen people who “froze” in place for about a minute at 5 p.m. yesterday to mark the fifth anniversary of the Iraq war. The group, situated in the middle…

Violent, bloody and chaotic; these are the images that come to us from Iraq on a daily basis. But in My Baghdad, now at Irvine Contemporary, local photographer Phil Nesmith presents another view of Iraq, one that captures the quiet moments of the every day. His photographs are small vignettes, short snippets of life, printed onto glass. They are pieces of time, capturing a small moment in the motion of a waving flag or birds…