Recommended Viewing: "The Prisoner"

This documentary by the directors of "Gunner Palace," is, first of all, simply an order of magnitude better than "Gunner Palace" -- more complex and nuanced, more stylistically innovative (still cartoons used to illustrate flashbacks), and just more substantive. The earlier film was criticized for being a bit too neutral to really say anything, and so maybe what Epperlein and Tucker needed was the strong voice of a single subject to carry the film, and Iraqi journalist and former Abu Ghraib prisoner Yunis Abbas is perfectly suited to this task.
This is a fascinating character study as well as a suspense story where the villains -- Saddam, U.S. military bureaucracy, nameless bullies and callous leadership -- are always shadowy and ill-defined. But this film, with its focus on Abbas' candid but uncynical first-person narrative -- and the names of dead prisoners and undocumented abuses he wrote, through it all the earnest journalist, on the inside of his underwear and on pieces of tin foil smuggled outside the prison in visitors' mouths -- is a testament to what really did happen not so long ago in U.S.-occupied, post-Saddam Iraq.

The Prisoner: or How I Planned to Kill Tony Blair