Miracle at St. Anna

A huge letdown. You can easily see what Lee was going for: an honorable corrective to Hollywood’s longtime WWII sentimentalizing, expanding the frame to include underrepresented black servicemen, the buffalo soldiers. But the conventional solutions arrived at by novelist and scripter James McBride (along with an uncredited Lee) are actually worse than those in John Wayne movies, neutralizing Lee’s talent for earthy anxieties.