It’s no doubt mere coincidence that in the very summer we withdraw our troops from Iraq, the two best movies of the summer happen to be about the Iraq war. But there’s a nice symmetry to it nonetheless. The two films, THE HURT LOCKER and IN THE LOOP, couldn’t be more different. One’s a tension-filled drama, the other a scathing political comedy . But both deal very directly with crucial aspects of the war, the first, with the boots-on-the-ground experience and the latter, with the political lead-up to the war. And ultimately, they both reach beyond this specific war to address larger and more universal issues.

THE HURT LOCKER is Kathryn Bigelow’s incredibly tense and taut look at a military bomb disposal unit operating in Iraq, circa 2004. This is a time when more and more troops are being lost to IEDs and the bomb technicians are finding themselves in constant demand. There’s a natural tension built in to their work – after all, each and every time they go to do their job, they’re putting their lives at high risk. But rather than cheapening the tension with overblown dramatics, Bigelow respects the soldiers’ work enough to stay out of the way. She lets the drama play itself out naturally, which only heightens the impact. Similar to Ridley Scott’s best movie, BLACK HAWK DOWN, THE HURT LOCKER keeps a very tight focus on the nuts and bolts of a military operation, capturing both the precision and the chaos of life on the ground. I know of no other movie that so convincingly captures the paranoia of American soldiers in Iraq, where every Iraqi seems suspicious and understandably so, given how easy it is to set off one of those bombs with a cellphone. Knowing one’s execution date concentrates the mind wonderfully, as Samuel Johnson once said, but so does defusing bombs. You’re hyper-aware of every tick when one of those ticks may be your last. THE HURT LOCKER recreates that experience for us, wonderfully.

IN THE LOOP is a completely different experience, but in many ways just as disturbing. Director Alberto Iannucci has crafted a sharp-as-a whip political satire that skewers mealy-mouthed politicians and their rabid handlers who control the flow of information through intimidation, abuse, and outright lies. Although the Iraq War is never mentioned, it’s very clear what the film’s immediate inspiration is. As the governments of both Great Britain and the United States inch inexorably toward war against an unnamed common enemy, the bureaucratic machinations behind-the scenes heat up hysterically. The prime mover is the Prime Minister’s communications director, played to near perfection by Peter Capaldi. The barrage of verbal abuse that spews forth from his snarling lips and showers down onto all who encounter him is breathtaking in its scope and vulgarity. The film is barely minutes old when he vigorously insults a female political aide by invoking both Jane Austen and a horse’s male appendage in a single fluid insult. And he’s just warming up. Before the day is done, he’s torn into members of Parliament, the media, the British Ambassador to the U.N, and a four-star American general, played by James Gandolfini.

But IN THE LOOP is more than just verbal cagefighting. These masters of berating wouldn’t have anything to do if it weren’t for the weak-kneed politicians they bully. Tom Hollander plays a particularly galling example of just such a politician, an MP in the British government who finds himself inexplicably voting for a war he personally opposes. He has endlessly ridiculous discussions with his toady advisors about whether or not he should resign in protest over the war. Is it always braver to do the right thing, he asks, or mightn’t it actually be braver to do the wrong thing? When he tries to convince his more dove-ish colleagues that he’s a “fake hawk,” both sides of the political spectrum dismiss him with contempt. Gandolfini’s character, for instance, calls him “an idiot” Or are you a “fake idiot?” he wants to know.

The only thing this fake idiot accomplishes is to force the hand of the American and British governments to produce the secret intelligence reports that justify war and invasion. The way those intelligence reports are fabricated is the final crowning joke of this furious farce. Satire may be what closes Saturday night, as the saying goes, but IN THE LOOP deserves a long, long run. It is very pointed, very foul-mouthed, and very, very funny. If DR. STRANGELOVE is ever to have a successor, IN THE LOOP could certainly fill the bill.