Lebanon follows an Israeli tank crew through the first day of the 1982 invasion of Lebanon. The director, Samuel Maoz, was in the IDF during that war. The film’s central gimmick, and I use that word reluctantly, is that the point of view is entirely that of the four soldiers in the tank. We either see conversation inside the tank, or we see the exterior through the cross-hairs of the turret scope.  Other soldiers, a prisoner, and a Phalangist irregular enter the tank for various purposes, but our four protagonists never leave it. The result is a deeply claustrophobic feel, and a heightened sense of the bewilderment and terror of those inside.
I found this approach artificial and a little trite for the first half of the movie. The tank crew act out some familiar themes in the opening scenes: the gunner who hesitates to shoot; the rebellious and resentful shell loader; the insecure tank captain; the inadvertent killing of a civilian. And as the tank drives through a Lebanese town, the cross-hairs of the turret scope linger too long on the faces of its inhabitants, seeking poignancy from the fear of a young boy, the anger of an old man, and, most exploitatively, a Christian women stripped naked and wailing for her daughter. But the second half of the movie works much better as the tank appears to get abandoned by the higher ups, and the tank crew, a platoon of IDF paratroopers, and some Phalangists engage in a tense standoff. There is an especially chilling scene when one of the Phalangists enters the tank and describes to the Syrian prisoner how he plans on torturing and killing him, all in Arabic, so the tank crew cannot understand.
The politics of the film are very much like those of Waltz with Bashir, about which we had a very interesting discussion here. The ordinary Israeli soldiers are unaware of atrocities with which their government might be complicit, and engage in small acts of kindness toward their prisoner. They are frightened boys doing their duty but wishing they were home. They are not responsible. Fault lies with the Phalangists, who are depicted as brutal thugs, and the cynical unnamed army superiors (whose voices we hear on the radio but never see) for whom the idealism of the 1967 or 1973 wars appears to have been completely forgotten.