Eye-opening: Robert Baer (left) photo: Many Rivers Films The Cult of the Suicide Bomber Directed by David Batty and Kevin Toolis The Disinformation Company, June 2 through 9, Cinema Village The War Tapes Directed by Deborah Scranton SenArt, opens June 2, Landmark Sunshine more film most popular most commented Prince Caspian by Ella Taylor Paraguayan Hammock by J. Hoberman James Nares's Downtown Empire Strikes Back by Ed Halter Reprise Tracking Shots by Ella Taylor Quantum Hoops: The Caltech Basketball Story Tracking Shots by ERNEST HARDY Girls Love Gay Male Porn Pucker Up by Tristan Taormino My Boyfriend's Kink Is Getting Fat. What Do I Do? Savage Love by Dan Savage Sex and the City Spoilers: A Sneak Preview of What Really Happens to Carrie and the Girls by Lynn Yaeger The Barely Legal Empire of Tony Alamo by Maria Luisa Tucker Our Favorite Writers Pick Their Favorite Obscure Books Summer Guide by ALEXANDER NAZARYAN NYPD Inaction Over a Missing Black Woman Found Dead Sparks a Historic Racial-Bias Lawsuit (9) Sean Gardiner Devo-Inspired Art in East Williamsburg (8) Maro The Barely Legal Empire of Tony Alamo (5) Maria Luisa Tucker David Mamet: Why I Am No Longer a 'Brain-Dead Liberal' (4) David Mamet Runnin' Scared: Deep South of Houston: Is a Soul-Food Restaurant Too Black for Soho? (4) Runnin' Scared: Chloe A. Hilliard

Throughout, a precise history is offered mostly from the perspective of Arabs, and the issue of martyrdom as an ideological movement is both scanned thoroughly and illustrated mercilessly with footage often culled from the terrorist organizations themselves. This is not the can't-we-get-along Arab-Persian world we see in most liberal nonfiction films, but a broader and helplessly apocalyptic view of an entire region crazed with anger, frustration, and bloodlust into objectifying death as a weapon, a cause for cosmic glory, and little else. (Martyrdom is a desirable choice even among the secular Syrian Socialist National Party, which Baer cannot fathom.) Forgive the 60 Minutes–style cutaways to Baer, and the experience of Muslim life knotted by destruction—not a TV pundits' opinions of such—can be eye-opening. Perhaps only someone with Baer's experience and gravitational field could strike the film's refreshing political balance, appalled by the violence but never ignorant of its origins in U.S.-sponsored oppression.

Ignorance is not rare, however. On a strictly experiential level, Deborah Scranton's The War Tapes is remarkable, tactile, and affecting; as a piece of sociopolitical culture with context and ramifications of its own, it's a worthless ration of war propaganda—ethnocentric, redneck, and enabling. A journalist given clearance for embedment with the New Hampshire National Guard, Scranton instead handed out video cameras to a handful of guardsmen, and her film is an edit of that footage—plus predictable interviews with their families at home, worrying and bucking up. In fact, for all of the firsthand, edge-of-battle immediacy, the upshot of Scranton's assemblage is concern for the feelings of tremendously sympathetic American grunts as they bulldoze through the Arab landscape and disdainfully observe the indigenous populace from a distance as if they were hyenas on the veld. It's no surprise that the soldiers are largely prone to mercenary self-regard and care only about getting home, not about where they've been, what they've done, or why. But what about us? The cinematic equivalent to a ribbon magnet, The War Tapes reaps festival awards while less tunnel-visioned docs (like Laura Poitras's My Country, My Country) go undistributed. So much for dissenting media channels.