In my review of his new film A Ghost Story, I mentioned that David Lowery’s greatest weakness prior to making it was in tying his creativity to slight variations on other people’s movies. Alexandre Moors’ The Yellow Birds, which Lowery cowrote with R.F.I. Porto, suggests he has not completely worked past that stage of his artistic development. A jumbled mix of stock war-film influences (The Deer Hunter, Apocalypse Now, and Platoon remain potent inspirations for men of a certain age), The Yellow Birds features some fine acting and character work inside a plot that tries five different paths without committing to any of them. This could be a potent way to explore the unpredictability of war, but instead feels like a callous attempt to maintain an audience’s interest in what is already plenty interesting – the corrosive effect of violence, no matter who perpetrates it.

Bartle (Alden Ehrenreich...