The Academy got it right earlier this year when they handed Alex Gibney the Best Documentary Oscar for his astonishing Taxi to the Dark Side. In agonizing detail, Gibney retraces the beginnings of the Bush administration’s reconfiguring of their torture policies.

Though the scandal became full blown with Abu Ghraib, Gibney shows us how the collapse of the Geneva Conventions began in Afghanistan prisons. Despite the administration’s claims that the Abu Ghraib torture was due to “a few bad apples,” Gibney’s interviews with some of those convicted illustrates quite clearly that the orders came from higher-ups.

It’s another brutal indictment of the Bush administration, but Gibney is careful to show us the real human stories behind the larger policy decisions. The taxi driver who inspired the title of the movie was a young Afghan desperate for work; he was completely cleared by American interrogators of any charges of terrorism, but still managed to die in the prison days later, due to repeated beatings

John McCain, so famous for having endured torture himself, is not let off the hook. While he condemned the Bush administration’s watering down of the Geneva Conventions, McCain would later vote for a bill that vindicated Bush officials—meaning no one will ever be held accountable for the torture crimes. (Incidentally, see p. 8 for an interview with Gibney about his latest film, the Hunter S. Thompson doc Gonzo).

In other DVD news, there’s something comforting about watching the boozy, womanizing Robert Downey, Jr. playing a boozy, womanizing arms dealer in Iron Man, one of a recent spate of well-above-average comic-book superhero adaptations. He’s actually a fine actor, and he’s joined by A-lister Gwyneth Paltrow, giving this Marvel entry a lot of class. But the best part is the unveiled political commentary on arms dealership and the military-industrial complex—this is a movie about Halliburton as much as it is about a comic book.