You might have seen Fahrenheit 9/11, director Mike Moore's take on this topic, but Robert Greenwald's documentary uses none of Moore's schtick to make its point. Greenwald uses intelligence professionals, diplomats and former Pentagon officials to pick apart the Bush administration's cases for war in Iraq, showing that the American public (and, subsequently, the Australian one) was sold a dud. Riveting.

Any Americans who are about to fly home to cast their votes might want to catch Uncovered - The War on Iraq (PG) before they go. A compulsive indictment of government spin and media collusion, it makes many of the same points that Fahrenheit 9/11 did, but it's determined not to be susceptible to any of the same criticisms. There's no room for pranks, tricks or woolly accusations. Instead, Uncovered does what so few public figures have done in relation to the Iraq invasion: it sticks to the facts.

Robert Greenwald has assembled a squad of weapons inspectors, CIA veterans and former presidential aides to sift through the "evidence" of Saddam Hussein's threat to the US, so a segment of television news footage will show us what Bush, Rumsfeld, Rice and Powell had to say, and then the experts will show how misleading or unfounded their claims were. The talking heads format might stop it reaching the broader audience of Moore's films, but thanks to its fast, dynamic editing, Uncovered doesn't feel like a lecture, either. It's as thrilling as it is depressing.

This is Michael Moore without the jokes - and without Moore's inflammatory stuff about the Bush-Saudi link. It's a dogged and fiercely unrelenting case against our military adventure in Iraq, composed of a sequence of talking-head observers, including former UN weapons inspector Scott Ritter. The points are repeatedly, even shrilly, hammered home. Right up to 9/11, the Bush administration said it had no interest in unseating Saddam. But after the WTC attack, and the subsequent failure to capture Osama bin Laden, regime-change in Iraq became fanatically promoted by a beady-eyed cabal of neo-cons: a consolatory, diversionary war built on a compost-heap of lies. Director Robert Greenwald has come up with a documentary arguably lacking in elegance or entertainment value. Yet, frankly, the point of view in Greenwald's film bears stating, and re-stating, especially when our pro-war liberal classes seem so unmoved by the great political scandal of the age. Both Uncovered and The Corporation are strident, certainly. They may find pundits lamenting the absence of subtlety, of nuance, perhaps preferring some more restful fiddle music while Fallujah burns, or maybe no music at all. Yet aren't we impatient with guardedly ironic documentaries about the little things? These Americans are out there hunting big game. Why don't we Brits try something like that?

This documentary may not have generated the publicity and praise that Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11 did, but it is a far superior film. The director Robert Greenwald's intention is simple: he has set out to provide a serious, methodical and authoritative demolition of the Bush administration's case for going to war with Iraq. You won't find any funny cartoon footage, wisecracks, guerrilla theatre or pop music. Greenwald assumes you are an adult who can follow a sustained argument. This is an old-fashioned documentary featuring a squad of talking heads -a team of experts who take on the Bush case point by point. What gives their argument a special authority is that this is not your usual collection of anti-war leftists but a bunch of veteran CIA employees, state department officials, foreign diplomats, life-long Republicans and patriots. Greenwald's film may lack fresh material, but it's an argument that anyone, pro-or anti-war, will benefit by seeing.

Uncovered: The War on Iraq is an important documentary, making a powerful case against the justifications used by the Bush administration to invade Iraq. But Uncovered is far from great filmmaking. It leaps from one talking head to another, without the editing finesse of Fahrenheit 9/11 or Horns and Halos, both of which were highly political yet stylish.

Directed by Robert Greenwald, Uncovered assembles an array of foreign policy specialists, former CIA analysts and other experts to discuss the evidence behind President Bush's claims that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction.

Almost all the interviewees point out flaws in administration thinking, and some explicitly argue that the Bush team made up its mind before looking closely at the evidence.

Directed by Robert Greenwald, Uncovered assembles an array of foreign policy specialists, former CIA analysts and other experts to discuss the evidence behind President Bush's claims that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction.

Almost all the interviewees point out flaws in administration thinking, and some explicitly argue that the Bush team made up its mind before looking closely at the evidence.

Mr. Greenwald, whose previous films include the controversial Outfoxed: Rupert Murdoch's War on Journalism, has a liberal, pacifist agenda, just like Michael Moore, who was hammered for bias in Fahrenheit 9/11. But he has assembled an impressive array of evidence that the war on Iraq was not justified by intelligence reports. These accusations, in fact, have become more common as the war in Iraq drags on and the media begin to investigate the sources that urged the administration to wage a war.

The people who are questioning the administration's evidence in Uncovered have impressive credentials. Among them are David Albright, a physicist and nuclear weapons expert; Robert Baer, a former CIA operative in Iraq and Lebanon; Rand Beers, a former special presidential assistant on terrorism; John Brady Kiesling, a career diplomat; Ray McGovern, another CIA analyst from 1964 to 1990; and Scott Ritter, the U.N.'s top weapons inspector in Iraq until 1998.

A final segment of Uncovered focuses on the question of whether these experts are betraying the U.S. troops on the ground in Iraq by criticizing the war. Not surprisingly, they all argue that it's necessary and patriotic to speak out when you think your nation is on the wrong course.

As you can probably tell, Uncovered is highly political. It's not meant to be entertaining, and it most likely will end up preaching to the choir rather than drawing a diverse audience. But it packs a powerful punch if you're ready for a lesson in foreign policy.

Uncovered will be followed by a 35-minute film, Soldier's Pay, which focuses on the Iraqis and U.S. troops who were involved in the shooting of director David O. Russell's Three Kings, released in 1999.

Uncovered: The War on Iraq is a smashingly effective documentary--I found it more resonant than Fahrenheit 9/11--yet to say that it's preaching to the converted would be generous; it's preaching to a microscopic sliver of the converted. The movie is part of a new wave of liberal-left exposes that wear their timely urgency like a campaign button. That sounds admirable, except that it's the very topicality of movies like Uncovered, The Hunting of the President, and Outfoxed: Rupert Murdoch's War on Journalism that results in their blending into the white noise of media overkill. Absent the proletarian star appeal of a Michael Moore, how many people will pay to see a fluid assemblage of the very same news clips that have been numbing them for free?

Robert Greenwald, the director of Uncovered (and Outfoxed as well), presents many fresh interviews, but his real talent is for deconstructing a flow of events you only thought you knew. He lines up statements by the Bush administration about the existence of WMD in Iraq over the period of a year: We see Donald Rumsfeld and Condoleezza Rice slide from aggression to caution to tongue-tied sheepishness, and then--the punchline--they begin to sound like United Nations weapons inspector Hans Blix, pleading for more time. In Green-wald's hands, Colin Powell's testimony before the U.N. becomes a meticulously annotated comedy of errors. The trademark of all these films is the blitzkrieg catchphrase montage. In Uncovered, President Bush and his associates keep repeating the words mushroom cloud. The sheer repetition is scary and eye-opening: a weapon of mass delusion.

It goes without saying that the presidential election is fought and won in the media, primarily in its visual vanguard. So far nobody has claimed that the result of Bush-Kerry depends on how they fare in some newspaper interview.

In fact, the only time the candidates or parties can seriously address the issues are during conventions or debates -- and they usually balk at doing so for fear of alienating voters who might disagree with them. Better to just praise our boys in the military and the character of the American people, call your opponent a sissy or a puppet and be done with it.

So this year, if you want to hear a real political argument you have to pay for it at the video store or, of all places, at the movies. The speaker's platform this week is given to "Uncovered: The War on Iraq," an extended version of a DVD/VHS of the same name that has done brisk business in the past six months.

Unlike the biggest-grossing propaganda film in history ("Fahrenheit 9/11" if you don't count "The Passion of the Christ"), "Uncovered" engages neither in smirking, character assassination nor innuendo. Director Robert Greenwald -- who also made "Outfoxed: Rupert Murdoch's War on Journalism," which opened the national debate on the political bias of Fox News -- takes a relatively high road in "Uncovered."

In fact, the only time the candidates or parties can seriously address the issues are during conventions or debates -- and they usually balk at doing so for fear of alienating voters who might disagree with them. Better to just praise our boys in the military and the character of the American people, call your opponent a sissy or a puppet and be done with it.

So this year, if you want to hear a real political argument you have to pay for it at the video store or, of all places, at the movies. The speaker's platform this week is given to "Uncovered: The War on Iraq," an extended version of a DVD/VHS of the same name that has done brisk business in the past six months.

Unlike the biggest-grossing propaganda film in history ("Fahrenheit 9/11" if you don't count "The Passion of the Christ"), "Uncovered" engages neither in smirking, character assassination nor innuendo. Director Robert Greenwald -- who also made "Outfoxed: Rupert Murdoch's War on Journalism," which opened the national debate on the political bias of Fox News -- takes a relatively high road in "Uncovered."

Using nothing but the (often contradictory) public pronouncements of the Bush administration, he presents its stated case for declaring war on Iraq and its defense of how and why it has been waged. Then he rebuts them point by point with the testimony of defense and national security analysts, former members of the intelligence community, diplomats and others who strongly disagree with the purpose, strategy and the conduct of the war.

The critics include many of the usual suspects: Former ambassador Joseph C. Wilson, who exposed the yellow cake uranium receipt as a forgery, and former administration member Richard Clarke, who argued against the invasion, made the same points in Michael Moore's movie. The most convincing arguments, however, tend to come from whistle-blowers such as former career CIA analyst Ray McGovern. He dissects the objectives and execution of Secretary of State Colin Powell's speech to the United Nations, saying it used discredited intelligence to make the case for war. McGovern concludes it was the American hero's worst hour.

"Uncovered" contains no off-screen narration to navigate us through the jammed-up information highway, nor does it address the motivations behind any of the testimony. We do hear weapons inspector Scott Ritter say that while he's a registered Republican who voted for George W. Bush, he would not let that impact his mission or his conclusion that Saddam Hussein's chemical weapon program was dismantled and the nuclear weapons program was a nonstarter.

More convincing is the newsreel odyssey of David Kay, who obviously arrives in Iraq fairly confident hidden weapons of mass destruction will be located, and goes home believing, almost apologetically, there were none to be found.

The criticism that will be leveled at a film that, like Moore's, primarily assembles evidence an educated citizen should already know, is that Greenwald has not invited any of the Bush administration's defenders and talk-show foot soldiers to refute the witnesses. Instead, he lets Rumsfeld, Cheney, Rice and Tenant speak for themselves.

He does not, however, use them as whipping boys or reduce them to comic figures. (Although Rumsfeld's defensiveness as he emphatically denies leading the public to believe that Iraq had nuclear weapon capability should give pause to anyone who doesn't want to parse what the meaning of "it" is.)

"Uncovered" has no interest in explaining the Bush administration's case for war for them: This is the prosecution's argument, and it is extremely well-made.

With Michael Moore's ''Fahrenheit 9/11'' approaching $150 million in worldwide grosses, it's hardly surprising that more political documentaries are turning up in theaters. Robert Greenwald's ''Uncovered: The War on Iraq'' began as a 58-minute DVD release in December 2003, and has now been expanded, with financial support from MoveOn.org and the Center for American Progress, into a 90-minute theatrical film that opens today in New York, Boston and Washington.

Apart from their disdain for President George W. Bush and his foreign-policy decisions, the two pictures couldn't be more different. Where Mr. Moore's film builds its case through sight gags, suggestive juxtapositions and emotional appeals, Mr. Greenwald's film is sober and meticulous.

Apart from their disdain for President George W. Bush and his foreign-policy decisions, the two pictures couldn't be more different. Where Mr. Moore's film builds its case through sight gags, suggestive juxtapositions and emotional appeals, Mr. Greenwald's film is sober and meticulous. It patiently chronicles the case for war in Iraq made by the president and his close advisers, noting every step on the way from blunt assertions that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction, through the long period of hedging (make that ''weapons-of-mass-destruction-related activities'') and up to the current administration position -- that even if there never were any such weapons, Mr. Hussein was a bad man and the world is better off without him.

Mr. Moore's film is dominated, of course, by Mr. Moore, a gifted comedian who has created an appealing character with his signature baseball caps and XXL T-shirts. In ''Uncovered,'' Mr. Greenwald is neither seen nor heard. Instead, he works by combining a shrewd selection of clips from television news reports with statements from dissenting members of the American intelligence community.

Rather than attempt a sweeping indictment of the Bush administration and all that it stands for, Mr. Greenwald focuses on a simple, demonstrable point: that the war in Iraq was sold to Congress and the American public through a coordinated series of public misstatements that at best look like wishful thinking and at worst like outright deception.

Mr. Greenwald presents a Macy's parade of experts -- everyone from John Dean to David A. Kay -- in support of his thesis, though the star of the show is Ray McGovern, an articulate and dryly funny former C.I.A. analyst who now heads the anti-invasion group Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity.

When Colin Powell tells the United Nations, ''Our conservative estimate is that Iraq today has a stockpile of 100 to 500 tons of chemical weapons agent,'' Mr. McGovern retorts: ''Where are they? What happened to them? My suspicion is that this is not our conservative estimate, this sounds very much to me like our neo-conservative estimate.''

There is some faint irony in the fact that ''Uncovered'' revels in the kinds of unabashed partisanship that Mr. Greenwald condemned in his last film, ''Outfoxed,'' an analysis of Fox News that concluded, to the astonishment of no one, that the channel had a conservative slant. But perhaps blatant partisanship is the reason why films like ''Fahrenheit 9/11'' and programs like ''The O'Reilly Report'' are so popular.

The profusion of blogs (on the left) and talk radio (on the right) has made a million viewpoints bloom, and the old models of journalistic objectivity are beginning to strike many consumers as stodgy and old-fashioned. Americans now want a rooting interest in their journalism, just as they do in their sports and entertainment. Mr. Moore knows how to give that to them, and so -- in a much more dignified, documented way -- does Mr. Greenwald.

Blow-by-blow debunking by experts of the Bush administration's case for war. Documentary with Ray McGovern, Stansfield Turner, John Dean, George W. Bush, Condoleezza Rice, Colin Powell. Directed by Robert Greenwald. At the Sutton and the Angelika, Manhattan.

No one will ever mistake director Robert Greenwald for Orson Welles. But then, no one ever mistook the Pentagon Papers for Marcel Proust.

It may be uncinematic, it may be talky and it may be a tad technical, but "Uncovered: The War on Iraq" is about as damning a document as one could imagine about the "rationalization and justification" for the ongoing quagmire in that unfortunate Middle Eastern country.

No one will ever mistake director Robert Greenwald for Orson Welles. But then, no one ever mistook the Pentagon Papers for Marcel Proust.

It may be uncinematic, it may be talky and it may be a tad technical, but "Uncovered: The War on Iraq" is about as damning a document as one could imagine about the "rationalization and justification" for the ongoing quagmire in that unfortunate Middle Eastern country. Unlike Michael Moore's "Fahrenheit 9/11," "Uncovered" doesn't strain to make George W. Bush look inept or Colin Powell look disingenuous or Dick Cheney look like the Antichrist. He lets them do it themselves, through their public statements and the counterarguments he presents via a Murderers' Row of espionage, military and security experts - mostly ex-CIA and all of the opinion that the public trust has been violated.

Having already had a life on DVD via Internet sales, "Uncovered" is clearly being released in theaters now to coincide with the presidential campaign. Pro-administration audiences (if there are any for this film) will argue that the voices heard in Greenwald's film are partisan, and they may be right - Joseph Wilson, for instance, has no love for the Bush people, given the way his CIA agent wife's cover was blown; former White House terrorism czar Richard Clarke, some will say, has a book to sell.

But the real agenda among all the ex-CIA agents seen in the film is what they see as the way the agency has been corrupted - having to use intelligence to argue for war, and having its now-former director, George Tenet, made "a member of the team," thus erasing the CIA's political independence.

"It is somewhat puzzling," says UN weapons inspector Hans Blix, "that you can have 100 percent certainty about the existence of weapons of mass destruction and zero percent certainty about where they are." "Uncovered" asks a lot of questions. That's just one of them.

"Uncovered: The War on Iraq" starts in an unusually calm and measured way for a documentary critical of that particular military adventure. All antiwar docs, it turns out, are not cut from the same cloth.

Instead of stentorian rhetoric, this Robert Greenwald-directed film begins quietly, with a group of experts matter-of-factly identifying themselves and stating their bona fides.

Here's someone with 28 years of experience in the Central Intelligence Agency, someone else with 35, yet a third who was awarded the agency's Career Intelligence Medal. Here's a former ambassador to Saudi Arabia, a retired lieutenant colonel, a whole platoon of people who take pride in the decades spent "serving my country."

Just as all supporters of the war in Iraq are not fire-breathing Vulcans from inside the Beltway, so all opponents are not hotheaded radicals from outside the establishment.

With the exception of a brief clip from the Washington editor of the Nation, the voices in "Uncovered" are not ideologues but rather classic bureaucrats, the people who usually toil in obscurity and rarely if ever make the evening news.

Instead of stentorian rhetoric, this Robert Greenwald-directed film begins quietly, with a group of experts matter-of-factly identifying themselves and stating their bona fides.

Here's someone with 28 years of experience in the Central Intelligence Agency, someone else with 35, yet a third who was awarded the agency's Career Intelligence Medal. Here's a former ambassador to Saudi Arabia, a retired lieutenant colonel, a whole platoon of people who take pride in the decades spent "serving my country."

Just as all supporters of the war in Iraq are not fire-breathing Vulcans from inside the Beltway, so all opponents are not hotheaded radicals from outside the establishment.

With the exception of a brief clip from the Washington editor of the Nation, the voices in "Uncovered" are not ideologues but rather classic bureaucrats, the people who usually toil in obscurity and rarely if ever make the evening news.

Which makes the level of opposition among these people to the war in Iraq especially impressive even though it's delivered in calm, measured tones.

The speakers are united in their horror of a process that they feel sent the U.S. into battle on the basis of rationalizations and justifications rather than the facts and realities they spent their careers trying to establish.

Because of his belief that "we all have short emotional memories," Greenwald takes pains to remind us of the atmosphere in this country before the invasion of Iraq. Over and over, we see key administration figures repeating the mantras of "weapons of mass destruction" and "death on a massive scale." We hear about "biological or chemical attacks in as little as 45 minutes" and are chastised like children for our desire for proof with an apocalyptic "we don't want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud."

Then the experts take over, and President Bush's prewar State of the Union address and Secretary of State Colin L. Powell's speech to the U.N. are both meticulously taken apart, claim by unsubstantiated claim. "It was a masterful performance," says former CIA analyst Ray McGovern, "but none of it was true."

What was done for weapons of mass destruction was also done, the film tells us, for the supposed link between Al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein. We're told that the reality is that Osama bin Laden "had total contempt" for Hussein and that, moreover, dictators classically do not give up control of weapons to others. "Saddam was a sociopath and a psychopath," one ex-analyst says, "but he wasn't irrational."

Former CIA employees were especially horrified at how things went down because of their feeling that the intelligence community was leaned on to support administration positions, that reports were subject to "data mining," the process of combing old information for new opinions.

As one veteran explains, the CIA's headquarters are out in Langley, Va., instead of Washington, D.C., specifically to prevent that sort of compromising pressure.

Like the war in Iraq, "Uncovered" has a noteworthy history. A considerably shorter, 57-minute version was released exclusively on DVD in December 2003, one of the first films to take advantage of an alternate, home-based distribution system created by MoveOn.org and the Center for American Progress.

The current version is 83 minutes long, and the most interesting of the new material is an extended interview with David Kay, the man the administration put in charge of finding those weapons of mass destruction -- and who now says, without the usual qualifications, "We were all wrong. That is most disturbing."

Although "Uncovered" is adamant in its opposition to the war, perhaps the most significant, most upsetting point it makes is distinctly nonpolitical.

Even if you grant the administration the best of motives and the purest of hearts, the ease with which its members were able to persuade the American public to go to war on the basis of something that has been proved to be untrue does not lighten the heart about the prospects for an informed democracy in this mass-media age.

Yet there are hopeful notes here. If you are looking for examples for America's finest hour, it's not our rush to start an optional war but rather that an anti-administration film like this can still be made and still be seen.

It's the kind of thing we take for granted but shouldn't. Other things we take for granted have been disappearing at a surprisingly rapid rate these days.

In March 2003, the Bush administration knew with professed certainty that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction and would use them on us.

Now we know that the only way Saddam could have had biological, chemical and nuclear weapons then was if he'd rubbed a lamp and been granted three wishes.

Didn't anybody in the intelligence community or among all the President's men know that?

The answer, in Robert Greenwald's despairing documentary, "Uncovered: The War on Iraq," is yes. Plenty of people in the know knew - people with backgrounds ranging from the CIA to the Iraq inspection teams to the Bush administration itself.

But according to their testimony in this film, Bush was so intent on invading Iraq, and initiating a Middle-East plan that his neo-con advisers had hatched years before 9/11, that their reservations were ignored.

This is Greenwald's second attack on the right this month. His "Outfoxed: Rupert Murdoch's War on Journalism," was released in theaters two weeks ago.

But he doesn't resort to any of the editorial flim-flam and smug theater that undermines the credibility of Michael Moore's "Fahrenheit 9/11." To a careful

follower of post-9/11 political news, there is nothing in "Uncovered" that should come as a surprise. Excluding Fox News, it's all been covered.

But recapping it in one tight, 83-minute film, and placing his sources in front of the camera, Greenwald has created a crisp historical document that is worth your time, even if the information in it was not worth the President's.

We do not usually write columns about feature films presented at the market. With more than a hundred major titles to review in different sections, there is a lack of time as well as space to go see hundreds more that are going through underground negotiations. Nevertheless, when all the selections have missed what would have made a remarkable world premiere, we have to repair the injustice. Yes, Uncovered: The War in Iraq is a documentary. Yes, it looks like television, of course, and that is because a lot of shots come from television archives. But what a burning piece!

Less flamboyant than Michel Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11 – and, therefore, perhaps less superficially entertaining - Uncovered: The War On Iraq is a must-see for every American who cares about their country, regardless of their political persuasion.

While the two films reach a similar conclusion – that the Bush Administration’s stated rationale for war was bogus – Greenwald’s documentary takes a more straightforward and intellectual approach to the subject. American and international audiences uncomfortable with Moore’s grandstanding and his unabashedly partisan tone will find more compelling material here, including chilling evidence that members of the Bush team at the very least misread or misinterpreted intelligence, or, more sinisterly, that they purposely distorted and misrepresented it.

While the two films reach a similar conclusion – that the Bush Administration’s stated rationale for war was bogus – Greenwald’s documentary takes a more straightforward and intellectual approach to the subject. American and international audiences uncomfortable with Moore’s grandstanding and his unabashedly partisan tone will find more compelling material here, including chilling evidence that members of the Bush team at the very least misread or misinterpreted intelligence, or, more sinisterly, that they purposely distorted and misrepresented it.

The film’s commercial prospects in its home territory - release is set for August – will depend on how willing Americans of all political views are to studying the issue before the November election. International audiences will applaud the film, which confirms long-held beliefs about current US policy, but how many people are willing to plunk down money at the theatre is unclear, perhaps preferring to wait for the video release. Ancillary markets look unusually strong.

Initially released as a 57-minute video that was partially funded, distributed and promoted by the online activist group MoveOn.org, the material has been updated and expanded into a 90-minute feature.

As before, the film presents in detail the government’s stated reasons for invading Iraq, including its contention that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction (WMDs), and rebuttals from an impressive array of government anti-terrorism experts, veteran CIA analysts, diplomats, career military personnel and diplomats, many of them Bush appointees.

The new film also turns a sharp eye on the mainstream media, which it charges with failing to turn a more critical eye on government claims, and delves into the government’s reliance on informers., most, if not all, of whom have since been discredited. Sound clips of Bush Administration personnel are intercut with conflicting testimony from the panel of experts.

The film’s strength is its roster of interviewees, people with no obvious political axe to grind, who speak in completely non-emotional, non-judgmental tones. All are impressive, but particularly persuasive are weapons inspectors David Kay and Scott Ritter, the latter declaring that he voted for Bush in the last election but did not let that get in the way of his findings. Other interviewees of note include former ambassador Joe Wilson; retired CIA analyst Ray Mc Govern, a 27-year veteran of the agency whose duties included preparing the daily briefing for the president; David Albright; and Rand Beers, who served as a National Security Council adviser to five presidents, including Reagan and the first Bush.

The market screening was a work-in-progress (a final scene is to be added) and was marred by technical problems. Film had to be started three times before the buggs were worked out but the production is chock full of chilling and damning information that is never less than riveting. It is an important document that should be required viewing for every voter in an increasingly polarised American society.

Richard Clark, Jon Stewart, and Air America are about to get some company in the media assault on George W. Bush. From Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 911, an incendiary attack on U.S. foreign policy and the Bush-bin Laden connection (premiering in Cannes this week and, as of press time, blocked for release by Disney), to the moveon.org-co-produced Uncovered: The Whole Truth About the Iraq War (opening during the Republican National Convention), politically charged documentaries are showing up in theaters and on television over the next several months. Along with anti-corporate works such as The Corporation, Super Size Me, The Yes Men, and Go Further, an unprecedented surge of activist documentaries is poised to join the election-year debate.

"There seems to be a groundswell of activists who are willing to challenge the information we've been force-fed," says Eamonn Bowles, a New York-based distributor (Magnolia Films) who launches the documentary invasion next week with Jehane Noujaim's Control Room, an inquiry into the media coverage of the current Iraq war as related by Al Jazeera journalists. "Not too long ago, it seemed obvious to me that Bush would get re-elected easily," continues Bowles, "but there really has been this incredible mobilization of the dissatisfied exercising their voice."

"This presidency has galvanized many who are lethargic on the left, and I include myself," echoes Lawrence Konner, a Hollywood screenwriter (Mona Lisa Smile) who founded an organization called the Documentary Campaign in late 2002. Aimed at producing nonfiction work that advocates social and economic justice, the company's first feature, Persons of Interest, co-directed by Alison Maclean (Jesus' Son) and Tobias Perse, looks into the Justice Department's post-9-11 detentions. "I feel like more of an activist on this issue than a filmmaker," says Perse. "You have an administration that has this idea of unilateral force, both in the world and domestically. And this film helps to question that policy."

Acquired by First Run/Icarus (sister company First Run Features will distribute the left-wing portrait Howard Zinn: You Can't Be Neutral on a Moving Train this summer), Persons of Interest will also be broadcast on the Sundance Channel. "We're trying to figure out how the film can be used on a grassroots political level," says Maclean. Adds Perse, "This film is designed to open up a conversation that was short-circuited within a month of 9-11."

The film medium, say documentarians, can be very useful as a political weapon, tapping into the emotions of voters that stories in print can't deliver. Konner cites Michael Moore's Bowling for Columbine as "a great model. Moore makes movies that are politically progressive, cinematically exciting, and get people emotionally involved as much as they are intellectually involved," he says. "People hear the information all the time, but it doesn't always get through."

The record-setting $21.5 million box-office gross of Columbine also supplied a financial precedent for distributors that once winced at the thought of releasing documentaries on a wide scale. "[Columbine] broke down a lot of barriers for docs," says Eamonn Bowles. "But it also identified a strong presence of the 'skeptic' audience, the folks who don't buy the party line."

Still, Moore's success hasn't shielded him from alleged attempts at corporate and government sabotage. Disney is trying to block its subsidiary Miramax from distributing Fahrenheit 911, because the movie is "against the interests" of the conglomerate's tax status and family-friendly image, according to statements reported in The New York Times last week. "This struggle has been a lesson in just how difficult it is in this country to create a piece of art that might upset those in charge," Michael Moore countered on his website the day after the story broke.

Morgan Spurlock's Michael Moore-esque Super Size Me, which follows the deleterious effects of the filmmaker's 30-day McDonald's binge, is proving how effective Moore's populist style can be. Long before opening in theaters last weekend (with box grosses of over $500,000), the documentary made headlines when McDonald's declared it was eliminating the Super Size option (while denying that Spurlock's film had anything to do with the decision). "The movie is definitely shaking the trees," says Spurlock. "There need to be movies that are not beholden to anyone, whether it's a media corporation or a government agency . . . to get ideas out that are getting buried in today's society."

Robert Greenwald, who made the Abbie Hoffman drama Steal This Movie!, felt an urgency to finish Uncovered: The Whole Truth About the Iraq War while the Bush administration's push to war was left unquestioned by the mainstream media. (Completed in November 2003, the movie has sold nearly 100,000 copies online; an expanded 90-minute version will be released in theaters this August.) "Part of the power of the movie and the hunger for the film is that we were in the middle of something," he says. "And here was a tool that was more user-friendly than a book, and it had this extraordinary relevance, because the story, up until recently, hadn't been available."

Indeed, these documentaries of dissent indict the media's passivity as much as the right wing. "The press offers this monolithic point of view," complains Control Room's Noujaim. "The situation that we're living in is really complex and volatile, so it's difficult to get a 'truth' out of one channel or one station or one voice. It's important that U.S. citizens have a better understanding of why things are happening and who are the people behind it, rather than just what's on the news."

Henry Thomason and Nickolas Perry's The Hunting of the President, an adaptation of the bestseller by Joe Conason and Gene Lyons, suggests that an extreme "right-wing cabal" conspired with decidedly un-independent counsel Kenneth Starr to unseat President Clinton. But the film's other main target is, says Thomason, "the good old liberal press," which published stories based on unreliable sources or no sources at all, and jumped on Monica-gate for the salacious headlines. With the documentary circulating in theaters this June, Thomason hopes the film "can sway a reporter or two to be really fair and balanced," he says, "and not be bullied by the extreme right and their network of AM radio and e-mail."

Other filmmakers have a more pointed goal. Michael Shoob, co-director with Joseph Mealey of Bush's Brain, an investigation into the "dirty tricks" of Republican puppet-master and alleged "co-president" Karl Rove, says, "Obviously, we wanted to push this information in an election year."

But can docs really rock the vote? "Sometimes films influence events beyond their origin. Sometimes they don't," says nonfiction veteran George Butler (Pumping Iron), who is currently rushing to complete Tour of Duty, a biographical portrait of his longtime friend John Kerry. "Sometimes you make a film like The China Syndrome, which causes all kinds of changes in the nuclear industry, or a film like Pumping Iron, which causes 100,000 gyms to open up in America and eventually makes Arnold [Schwarzenegger] the governor of California."

"If I didn't think documentaries had an impact, I don't think we would make them," says Mark Achbar, co-director of the Noam Chomsky cult film Manufacturing Consent and of this year's festival hit The Corporation, an investigation into globalization and corporate power that has won audience awards at film festivals around the world and opens at Film Forum this June. "The people are speaking," says Achbar. "Membership in activist groups is shooting up because people come out of [The Corporation] informed, engaged, enraged, and ready to put thought into action. There's no question that it has an impact. It's absolutely record-setting in Canada. We even knocked Lord of the Rings off a couple screens."