Movies: A Hot New Crop of Docs

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Chris Paine's documentary makes an unapologetic case for the car and an unofficial indictment of the forces allied against it: the auto and gasoline industries, an Administration stocked with former executives of oil companies and, not least, the American consumer, who would rather strut in a gas-gorging Hummer than put-put in a modest little EV1.

Well, that was the '90s for you. Today, with gas at $3 a gallon and the Japanese showing Detroit how to make a profit from hybrid (gas plus electric) cars, those movie idealists don't seem so silly. It was the rest of us who had our heads in fantasyland. Release date: June 28

LEONARD COHEN: I'M YOUR MAN

For a while in the '60's, with Bob Dylan forging poetry from folk and rock music, it seemed possible that more traditional bards might return the compliment and make pop out of poetry. The leading candidate was Leonard Cohen, a Montreal poet and novelist. Cohen wrapped his sepulchral baritone around songs of betrayal and loss that shivered with the bruised romantic's gift of inexhaustible awe. Cohen never became a pop star--others had hits from his lusciously haunting Suzanne and Sisters of Mercy--but his pieces hung in the mind, like psalms or dirges remembered from childhood.

"I'm not a very nostalgic person," Cohen says in director Lian Lunson's feature-length tribute in words and music. "I neither have regrets nor occasions for self-congratulations." The congratulations come from others: Bono, who proclaims, "This is our Shelley; this is our Byron"; and a passel of singers (Kate McGarrigle, Rufus Wainwright, Antony, Nick Cave) performing his pieces in concert.

In one of his later tunes, Cohen sings, "Well my friends are gone and my hair is gray/ I ache in the places where I used to play/ And I'm crazy for love, but I'm not coming on./ I'm just paying my rent every day in the Tower of Song." Next to Cohen's castle of music, place this fetching little monument to the bard of rapturous bereavement. Release date: June 21

THE ROAD TO GUANTANAMO

In announcing three suicides in the U.S. detention camp at Guantánamo, Cuba, this month, officials described the inmates in much the same terms President Bush used in 2003 when he said, "The only thing I know for certain is that these are bad people." This, despite the fact that few of the Gitmo detainees have been charged with a crime, and none has been convicted.

Three such prisoners were British nationals. Ruhel Ahmed, Asif Iqbal and Shafiq Rasul had gone to Pakistan for a wedding. Their timing was unfortunate: September 2001. Their itinerary was disastrous: they wandered into Afghanistan and, through a series of wrong turns, were rounded up with Taliban soldiers. In vain they pleaded their innocence to their captors (Afghan, British and U.S.). Soon, as they tell it in this mixture of interviews and re-enactments, they were off to Gitmo for two years of physical, psychological and religious abuse. In 2004 they were released, without charges or apologies.