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.

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.

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?

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."

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.

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.

"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.

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.

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.