While all of Jandal's charismatic, positively Shakespearean pontifications and self-doubt speak loudly, Hamdan's refusal to participate in The Oath makes an equally disquieting statement. We learn he has become solitary and withdrawn, and there's a glaring uncertainty about where his wrongful captivity will lead him. A skeptic will feel equally leery of Jandal's motives, and his future. For Poitras, the legacy of the War on Terror is that it may remain unresolved for generations. The message weighs heavily throughout The Oath, and long after it ends.
Christopher Gray can be reached at cgray@thephoenix.com.
THE OATH | directed and produced by Laura Poitras | co-produced by Jonathan Oppenheim, Aliza Kaplan, and Nasser Arrabyee | 96 minutes | at Movies at the Museum July 9-11 | Fri 6:30 pm; Sat-Sun 2 pm | $7 | moviesatthemuseum.com
Related:
Review: Defamation, Days of plenty, Documentary Man, More 
- Review: Defamation
Yoav Shamir, a young Israeli documentarian, goes off to America and Eastern Europe with a camera and a question: is anti-Semitism an important concern today for Jews, or are those anxious about it being unduly paranoid?
- Days of plenty
In Collapse , the latest documentary by Chris Smith ( American Movie , The Yes Men ), the director condenses a two-day, March 2009 interview with a little-known investigator named Michael Ruppert into a bleak harbinger of the world's seemingly inevitable ruin.
- Documentary Man
If you think the polemic salvos Michael Moore churns out define the modern documentary, you've either succumbed to Moore's manipulative shenanigans or are unfamiliar with the works of Frederick Wiseman. No disrespect to the Roger & Me director, he is what he is — a man with a camera and a handful of pixie dust.
- Review: The Most Dangerous Man in America
At age 79, Daniel Ellsberg is getting the last guffaw.
- Review: Visual Acoustics: The Modernism Of Julian Shulman
Eric Bricker's documentary celebration of America's most renowned architectural photographer is effusive in its praise, tame in its public-television-style execution.
- Review: Neil Young Trunk Show
If a Neil Young neophyte can find himself rocking in a cinema seat to the spirited, soulful music performed in this second of a rumored triptych of Demme-directed, Young-starring concert documentaries, long-time fans are bound to break their armrests.
- Review: Sweetgrass
One of the most enigmatic close-ups I’ve seen on screen this year is of a sheep. It stares into the camera at the beginning of Ilisa Barbash & Lucien Castaing-Taylor’s documentary about a round-up of the critters in Montana’s Beartooth Mountains, ruminating thoughtfully, as enigmatic as the Mona Lisa.
- Interview: Ray Manzarek of the Doors
It’s been nearly 40 years since the death of Jim Morrison, but the surviving members of the Doors, keyboardist Ray Manzarek, guitarist Robby Krieger and percussionist John Densmore have kept soldiering on, playing in various reformations of the ground-breaking band. The meteoric rise of the band is chronicled in the new documentary, When You’re Strange.
- Band of brothers
Acclaimed local director David Bettencourt immortalizes Providence-via-Attleboro punk pioneers Neutral Nation in his latest documentary, It’s a Bash! .
- Review: The Cartel
First-time documentarian and TV journalist Bob Bowdon’s broad primer on what’s rotting American education runs like a 90-minute 20/20 segment.
- Review: Babies
Director Thomas Balmès’s spare, occasionally stirring documentary toddles to Namibia, Mongolia, the US, and Japan to capture a year in the life of four infants. The San Francisco family comes off at once as a gross cliché of Western privilege, complete with roof-deck Jacuzzi and baby yoga.
- Less
Topics:
Reviews
, Entertainment, Movies, Yemen, More
, Entertainment, Movies, Yemen, documentary, The Oath, Abu Jandal, Laura Poitras, Less
