Sudhir Muralidhar

Nothing But the Truth, the new fictionalized film about the Judith Miller scandal, leaves out nuance in favor of neat drama.

It’s not that the subject matter isn’t compelling, it’s that very few of this year’s slew of political films actually stand up as triumphs of cinematic art and storytelling.

A new documentary offers an impressionistic catalog of horrors in western Sudan but skimps on context or prescription.

A new film, Ghosts of Cite Soleil, documents the lives (and deaths) of Haitian gang members in the wake of Jean-Bertrand Aristide’s ouster.

A Mighty Heart tells Mariane Pearl’s wrenching story with taste and skill — but perhaps too much restraint.

Any work that throws Matt Drudge, Rush Limbaugh, and Sean Hannity into conniptions based entirely on a one-sentence description of its premise is worth paying at least some attention to. The new faux documentary Death of a President, which depicts the imagined 2007 assassination of George W. Bush, is certainly no exception. Knee-jerk demagoguery is […]

I must admit to watching Oliver Stone’s new film, World Trade Center, with a fair amount of trepidation. Not because I fear revisiting the events of 9-11 — Paul Greengrass’ United 93 has already demonstrated that a film can tackle the subject with grace and clarity — but because I had read enough conservative commentators […]

Just before seeing The War Tapes, Deborah Scranton’s new documentary featuring firsthand footage shot by national guardsmen in Iraq, I complained to a friend that I’ve found many of the battleground documentaries to come out of this war to be rather, well, boring. It’s not really the fault of the filmmakers, I noted — embedded […]

Of the many narratives that emerged from the events of September 11, 2001, it is hardly surprising that the first one to be dramatized for a major studio film is the story of United flight 93. The account of that doomed flight, to the degree to which it can be known, offers a gripping portrait […]

In the months approaching the 2004 presidential election, it was easy to think that the most important people in the race weren’t the candidates or their running mates but rather the political consultants they had advising them. After all, most of the media coverage focused obsessively on the process behind the campaigns, and journalists were […]