Kimberly Peirce hasn't been to war -- but her younger brother has. The Iraq veteran, now 25, introduced her to videos shot by soldiers with lightweight cameras propped on sandbags or wired into Humvees and helmets, edited and scored with Toby Keith, AC/DC and other music.

"They were mesmerizing. I would sit there for hours and hours and hours and just rewatch these videos," said writer-director Peirce, whose "Stop-Loss" opens today.

"The entire movie was born from that spirit, that energy," which is why she thinks it can break the losing streak of other recent war-related movies such as "In the Valley of Elah," "Rendition" and "Grace Is Gone."

The never-ending news cycle, the fact that films are arriving in theaters even as the war continues, the shifting situation on the ground and the audience appetite for escapist entertainment have conspired to make war movies a tough sell these days.

"It's very hard for fiction to compete with the 24/7 news cycle, and this has been obviously the most widely televised conflict in the history of the world," Ross Douthat, a senior editor at The Atlantic, said earlier this week.

In the April issue, he examines, "The Return of the Paranoid Style: How the Iraq War and George W. Bush sent the movie industry back to its favorite era -- the 1970s."

"In the past six years, the movie industry has produced exactly zero major motion pictures dedicated to lionizing American soldiers fighting on the ground in Iraq or Afghanistan," he wrote. "We expected John Wayne; we got Jason Bourne instead."

Or, in the case of Peirce, a fictional Texas soldier named Sgt. Brandon King, who returns from Iraq to a hero's welcome and hometown parade, only to be told he cannot leave the Army. He's been stop-lossed, which means his tour has been extended against his expectations and his will.

The movie, Peirce's first since her directorial debut of "Boys Don't Cry" with Oscar winner Hilary Swank, stars Ryan Phillippe, Channing Tatum, Abbie Cornish, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Victor Rasuk and Rob Brown.

"It's definitely this generation, it's the YouTube generation that films itself and puts it on the Internet," Peirce said in a recent phone interview. "I also think it's the first one that's a band of brothers. Look at the cast ... they're all the right age, the age that's fighting this war."

The movie, Peirce said, lets them come to life, crawls inside their stories and shows them trying to reconnect with their families. "It's really a coming home movie."

It's more accident than design that "Stop-Loss" arrives on the heels of the Iraq War's fifth anniversary and as the U.S. military death tally reached its 4,000th soldier. Peirce embarked on a 22-city tour to screen and promote the movie last fall.

"I've had amazing responses in every single city, from San Diego to Phoenix to New York to Atlanta. Not only do audiences love the movie, but they stay for the Q&A, at least an hour, and not only ask me about the movie but they tell their stories. I had vets stand up at nearly every screening and just say thank you for making this movie."

Her younger brother enlisted in the Army after 9/11 and was sent to Iraq. "You'll never know what fear is until you have a child being shot at in a combat zone," her mother told her.

"She was beside herself with terror, because if something happens to a soldier in a unit, they have a news blackout," Peirce said, and soldiers cannot communicate with their loved ones.

"She wouldn't go home at night from work because she would be terrified if they were there, they would give her news that she didn't want. So, if she wasn't there, they couldn't give it to her, and women I interviewed all over the country went through that. Men, too."

Peirce, whose brother is now back in the States, filmed people across America, particularly in the literal heartland, about why soldiers signed up and what their combat experience and return home were like.

She wanted "Stop-Loss" to be told from the soldier's point of view, and that includes the ending. "It's a character story, and this is a guy who signed up after 9/11 for all the right reasons, to defend his home and his country.

"He had the profound realization that nearly every soldier I spoke to had, which is you can sign up for one reason, but when you're over there, it's about survival, protecting the guy to your left and to your right. Or woman. And about bringing your soldiers home safely. For this man, leading your men is everything."

As the eight-year gap between movies indicates, Peirce doesn't take her projects lightly.

"I have a very old-fashioned idea of entertainment. That entertainment, for me, has to be meaningful, it has to touch the human soul, it has to touch the spirit, it has to be about my family and my country and things that ultimately are the biggest questions in my life. ...

"So I look at this, my brother fought, my country was at war; this is another one of the biggest questions of my life: What did I learn? I learned so much about my culture and about soldiers and about myself, but I also learned about this camaraderie that's the most important thing to soldiers," she said.

"That, to me, is entertainment."

The Atlantic's Douthat had yet to see "Stop-Loss," but he said it has a different sensibility and is being pitched in a different way.

"It's got less of this sort of mournful war-is-hell theme with which they marketed 'In the Valley of Elah,' for instance, and it's focused on this as a story about young people in love, deep in the heart of Red America and so on. And it has a matinee-idol cast."

In other words, it's not Robert Redford, Meryl Streep and Tom Cruise in the excessively talky "Lions for Lambs," which nose-dived with critics and audiences.

Douthat says "Lions" falls into one of three genres of war movies, the one about stupidity in high places. The other two: familiar, Vietnam-style movies, such as "Redacted," about troops run amok; and troops as victims, as with "In the Valley of Elah."

In "Elah," Tommy Lee Jones earned an Oscar nomination as a father whose soldier son vanishes and is found murdered. It was inspired by the disappearance of a young Army enlisted man just home from Iraq and detailed in a Playboy article and, later, a "48 Hours Mystery" on CBS.

Douthat says it's hard to know if audiences aren't responding to war movies because of subject matter or quality. One notable exception: Michael Moore's "Fahrenheit 9/11," which was released in June 2004 and grossed $119 million in the United States.

"Most of the other documentaries seemed to, more or less, play it straight. What Moore has is the ability to crowd-please, in a way even the best and, more importantly, honest documentarians don't necessarily."

Notable Vietnam movies such as "The Deer Hunter" (1978), "Platoon" (1986) and "Born on the Fourth of July" (1989) also were crowd-pleasers. But those movies obviously didn't come out while the war was being waged.

"There was no pretense among the people making them, that by making this film, we will stop the war," Douthat said. "Maybe that is part of what's weakening these films artistically and diminishing their audience. It feels like you're being hectored into doing something."

Gary Kaboly, director of exhibition for Pittsburgh Filmmakers, suggests Americans are on information overload from broadcast, cable and satellite TV, plus the Internet (along with newspapers and magazines).

"The density of information, regardless of who's providing it, turns people off. They want to go to the movies to escape this stuff. Unfortunately," he said.

Filmmakers was playing "Taxi to the Dark Side" at the Harris Theater, Downtown, the week it won the Oscar for best documentary.

It uses the death of a 22-year-old taxi driver at Bagram air base in 2002 to examine how interrogation techniques that ranged from cruel to criminal migrated from Afghanistan to Iraq and Guantanamo Bay. "Taxi" is not easy to watch, but it is intelligent, illuminating and timely.

"The crowds didn't come, not like we expected," Kaboly said. "I wouldn't say it was a bust at the box office, but when something wins the Academy Awards or generates lots of publicity," it's natural to expect an enthusiastic response.

"People are overwhelmed by it; they don't want to go to the movie theater to get this information that's easily accessible these days on cable television and the Internet," Kaboly said. "They want to escape, since it's there all the time."

Even though Vietnam was part and parcel of the evening news in the 1960s and early '70s, reporters weren't doing live reports, and there was no CNN or Fox News Channel or MSNBC.

Filmmakers won't stop playing worthwhile war films -- after all, it booked "The War Tapes," "Home Front" and "Iraq in Fragments," among others -- but it may lower expectations. Even "Grace Is Gone," with John Cusack as the husband of a woman killed in Iraq, didn't live up to expectations.

"Grace," in fact, became the poster child for movies bought at the 2007 Sundance Film Festival that didn't pay off. The Weinstein Co. paid a reported $4 million for the worldwide rights, and it has grossed $51,000 in the United States.

Director-writer James Strouse told the trade publication Variety he had hoped the Weinsteins would capitalize on the early 2007 momentum and quickly open it. The movie arrived in theaters closer to year's end.

"By the time they released it, we were at the tail end of the Iraq War film failures and the company didn't do much to try and distinguish us from the pack," Strouse said. "To be honest, I think the moment had passed for the film."