Where the Real Action Is - all five nominees for best documentary are politically charged

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Not so long ago, the documentary feature category was among the snooziest at the Oscars, the target of jokes that said you couldn’t lose by making a film about the Holocaust. That backward-looking pattern began to morph when Michael Moore won the 2002 award with “Bowling for Columbine,” and exploded with last year’s win for Al Gore’s one-man show, “An Inconvenient Truth.” Odd though it sounds, Michael Moore and Al Gore have made the image of documentaries — O.K., maybe not sexy, but hot.

This year all five nominees are politically charged, four are about war, and amazingly, only one feels like homework. Spurred by global conflict and by technology that allows filmmakers to turn out movies in months rather than years, these works carry urgent messages. With their pointed arguments, though, this year’s nominees also raise an inescapable question: Can they have any real political impact?

They try in extremely varied ways. Mr. Moore’s “Sicko” is wildly comic while tearing apart the country’s health care system. Alex Gibney’s “Taxi to the Dark Side,” about American abuses of prisoners in the war on terror, is eloquent.

And even the less artistic films vividly present the faces and voices of people who have witnessed some of today’s most anguishing conflicts. In Sean Fine and Andrea Nix Fine’s moving “War/Dance,” those faces and voices belong to Ugandan children who enter a music competition, even though their lives have been shattered by decades of civil war. Charles Ferguson’s gripping “No End in Sight” relies on former Bush administration officials to make the case that in its earliest stages the American military operation in Iraq was catastrophically mismanaged. Even Richard E. Robbins’s straightforward “Operation Homecoming” has enlightening moments as it presents writing by American soldiers who have served in Iraq and Afghanistan. (All the films are available: “Taxi” and “War/Dance” in theaters, and the rest on DVD.)

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/15/movies/awardsseason/15docu.html?th&emc=th