Directed by Robert Redford. Starring Robert Redford, Meryl Streep, and Tom Cruise. Rated PG. Opens Friday, November 9, at the Park Theatre.

Once you've seen Lions for Lambs , it's not so easy to merely sip your Starbucks coffee and bitch about the situations in Iraq and Afghanistan and the politicians who are to blame. Not that everybody in this film doesn't talk a lot. Juxtaposing two conversations–one between a senator and a journalist, the other between a professor and his student–with two American soldiers on a mission in Afghanistan, the film isn't shy about the fact that director Robert Redford and writer Matthew Michael Carnahan ( The Kingdom ) have a thing or two to say about all of the above. It's a persuasive, strategic strike, armed with big guns Meryl Streep and Tom Cruise, plus Redford, and it's loaded with passion, brains, and provocative questions.

Cruise is a smooth operator as hot-shot Republican senator Jasper Irving, who is selling a new strategy for the war on terror, and Streep, equally convincing, is Janine Roth, the seasoned journalist to whom he's pitching his plan.

On a California university campus, Prof. Stephen Malley (Redford) is engaged in a more philosophical discussion with promising slacker student Todd Hayes (Andrew Garfield). The young cynic isn't keen to hear about Malley's former students, Ernest Rodriguez (Michael Peña) and Arian Finch (Derek Luke), whose class project proposed an idealistic solution to moral and political lethargy. In fact, as these four debate, soldiers Rodriguez and Finch, in tense, affecting scenes, are injured and alone in the Afghan mountains with the Taliban lurking.

Though Lions isn't fond of dumb leaders–Malley quotes a poet who called soldiers lions and their superiors, leading them to slaughter, lambs–it's not quite an antiwar film. Cruise's battle-minded senator earns points for pursuing his convictions just as Streep's liberal journalist does for asking hard questions. Call it a passionate anti-apathy film. Its message, delivered in unflinching performances: decide what you stand for, then act. And if you fail? Says Malley: "At least I've done something." It's talky, yes, and deeply compelling.

Link: Lions for Lambs official site