This review originally ran Sept. 3, 2022, in conjunction with the film’s world premiere at the Telluride Film Festival.
“Retrograde,” director Matthew Heineman’s searing, intimate look at the United States’ chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2021, opens with an aural collage of speeches from four U.S. Presidents (George W. Bush, Barack Obama, Donald Trump and Joe Biden), which offers a stark reminder of the two decades of this “forever war,” a time period starkly underlined when a Green Beret asks a 20-year-old soldier if he was even born when this war started.
That 20 years was abruptly cut short in 2021 when President Biden was inaugurated and swore to bring the troops home. While it sounds good on paper, or in a political speech, as we found out, and as Heineman’s film — making its world premiere at the Telluride Film Festival — carefully details, it was far, far more