Critics reviews

If "Southern Comfort" sought to place the viewer on the ground in a Vietnamese jungle, Peter Davis's 1974 documentary, "Hearts and Minds," recently reissued by Criterion in a new dual-format edition with two hours of unused material, provides an evocative, often gut-wrenching sense of what it was like to be living in the United States during the Vietnam War.

Decades later, these lapses seem much less important thanHearts And Minds' general inquiry into America's state of mind about the Vietnam War while it was still (technically) in progress. Davis takes an approach that could be called either impressionistic or scattershot, according to taste; rather than carefully build an argument, the film skips from one scarcely related topic to the next, based more on mood than on logic.

The politics of Hearts and Minds are familiarly left of center, and many of the clips Davis put together feature images that have since become synonymous with the war's innumerable atrocities. Time, however, hasn't dulled their immediacy. There's simply no shaking the infamous clip of a U.S. soldier putting a bullet into Nguyễn Ngọc Loan's head in the middle of a sunlit street, blood flowing from the young Vietnamese man's head as if from a water fountain...

Not only the definitive American documentary about the war in Vietnam but a landmark political action... Davis's trump moments are strictly Eisensteinian: cutting from a Vietnamese capitalist hopefully outlining his future plunder to a busy factory rapping out prosthetic limbs or a heartbreaking funeral scene, complete with loved ones assailing the coffin, followed by beefeater General Westmoreland asserting that "Orientals" don't put "the same high price on life as does the Westerner."