Fahrenheit 9/11 Review

Cheerfully biased and bloody angry, the Oscar-crowned king of documentary Michael Moore is back and this time George W. Bush should be very, very afraid indeed. Because it's Dubya's ass that the rotund "Bowling for Columbine" creator is aiming for with this no-holds-barred, Palm D'Or-winning critique of the current leader of the free world and his cronies. The tone and quality of the polemic is evident right from the brilliant pre-credits sequence, where armed with merely a faux-naïve commentary and the facts, Moore lightly exposes the distinctly dodgy dealings that handed the 2000 election to Bush and not to Gore. But it's when he gets to the Bush administration's reaction to 9/11 and their resulting attack on Saddam that Moore really lets loose. And trust me, he takes no prisoners.

And while the old Moore tricks and weakness are still evident - quotations taken out of context and publicity stunts are still used to shore up his infuriatingly simplistic politics - "Fahrenheit 9/11" does mark a welcome progression in the filmmaker's methods. Staying mostly behind the camera, he digs up previously unpublicised facts, including revealing the Saudi money that helped Bush Jr and Sr in their oil exploits and asking why members of Bin Laden's family were able to fly out of America only two days after September 11th. British fans of Moore may miss any real mention of our great leader's part in the invasion on Iraq but such omissions and Moore's sometimes dubious arguments are completely forgotten when he shows you the true cost of Bush and Blair's folly: footage of dead Iraqi children deemed too shocking for TV news and an American mother lost in grief for her dead son. A devastating and unforgettable piece of filmmaking.