Four stark and decidedly un-Hollywood war movies are playing on the Vineyard this summer. They include works by three longtime Vineyard residents: Doug Liman who directed The Wall, Brad Silberling, who wrote, directed and produced An Ordinary Man, and Matthew Heineman who made the documentary City of Ghosts, about ISIS in Syria. Trevor Graham’s Monsieur Mayonnaise screened at the Martha’s Vineyard Hebrew Center last Sunday.

All are determined efforts to show war as it is unvarnished, in all its confounding misery.

Doug Liman’s film The Wall is perhaps the best war movie I have ever seen. It is reminiscent of the Alfred Hitchcock classic The Lifeboat. But whereas that movie is built around a stage set, portraying a taut drama about what to do with a German sailor picked up at sea after a terrible U-boat attack, the Liman film is set in the Mohave desert and features super-realism. Three long-distance snipers, two American and one Iraqi, try to eye each other from a distance, ready to deliver or receive a high-powered bullet coming from a mile away so that the impact comes without warning. There is no sound of gunfire or hiss of an incoming shell, only the burst of a gaping wound. Set in the waning days of the Iraq war, The Wall is interspersed with tight action photography that offsets the dialogue between an Iraqi terrorist and an American soldier after a break into radio transmissions. “Why are you here?” the Iraqi asks of the American. You get the picture.

An Ordinary Man, although also interspersed with gripping action scenes, is essentially the study of a war criminal’s mind. The last holdout from the Serbian-Croatian wars, a Serbian general seeks to elude all efforts at capture to stand trial before the International Tribunal in The Hague. A maid comes his way who may or may not be his path to salvation. In the end, he has to decide what risks he is prepared to take for a measure of freedom while on the lam. Meanwhile he curses his country for not recognizing the sacrifices he has made in sacrificing the young lives of its adversaries.

Monsieur Mayonnaise is a different kind of war movie but with clear similarities to the others. The producer and director, a cartoonist, goes searching for family roots, particularly that of his father who has escaped the Nazis in Germany and now has to evade them again as they occupy France where he has set up a restaurant famous for its special brand of homemade mayonnaise. What follows is a story of escapes, rescues and the conversion of bad fortune into opportunity. But it is told through the medium of cinema-photographic collages setting documentary images of Hitler being kind to dogs and children against the horror of his genocidal campaign. The director-producer explains that he has to show the human side of Hitler to really show the horror.

In all three films their directors swear that they are merely storytellers. But they are much more. Each is a gifted movie-maker conjuring up images that are searing in their different ways. Each deals with the question of evil in our time. The Liman film is the darkest, and reminiscent of Jean Paul Sartre’s No Exit, suggesting we are doomed to be reincarnated in an endless mire of war fought by protagonists who do understand each other and are unable to know from where the next bullet might come.

In terms of personal psychodrama, An Ordinary Man is the most powerful, featuring Ben Kingsley in a masterful character study of a man ready to commit atrocities for the good of his country but less sure of himself when it comes to personal matters.

And while Monsieur Mayonnaise may put a smile on your face, it is wracked with sadness by the stupidity of it all. Matthew Heineman’s film, of which I have only seen the trailer, promises to be in the same tradition.

Are Vineyarders prepared for this sort of heavy summer entertainment? If attendance at these events is the gauge, the answer is a resounding yes. The showings are sold out, and for good reason: the movie-making talent is astounding.

Allan Gerson lives in Chilmark and Washington, D.C.