There will be no better film about the Iraq war than Nick Broomfield’s Battle for Haditha. With its emotional immediacy and depth-charged intelligence, it surpasses even Brian De Palma’s Redacted, its closest cousin in subject (a true-life atrocity) and treatment (reportage-style re-enactment).

When a slaughter of 24 Iraqi innocents followed the road-bombing of a US convoy in Haditha in November 2005, the truth of the incident lay buried until a Time magazine exposé. Broomfield’s skills as a documentarist, which migrated to dramatised nonfiction in his recent Ghosts, infest the whole of this harrowing movie. He casts real Marines and Haditha townspeople, then has them improvise their dialogue. A sense of locality and a mobile camera combine to persuade us that we have been flung into a fermenting reality, where we cling anxiously to hints of the familiar.