Alex Gibney's Oscar-nominated Taxi to the Dark Side sheds welcome, if not comforting, light on the half-truths that have surrounded the United States' treatment of Afghan and Iraqi prisoners at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and other military installations throughout the world. It is, at once, among the most riveting and hard-to-watch documentaries of recent years.
Gibney's 2005 Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room laid bare the festering wound that is corporate greed and hubris in 21st-century America. With Taxi, he wades through all the military-speak and legalese to make a convincing argument that torture is not only widespread, but systemic, when it comes to treatment of prisoners of the U.S. war on terror.
