A Hot New Crop of Docs

By RICHARD CORLISS

They are the anti-megamovies, the blockbuster busters. They boast no big special effects, no $20 million stars. Yet documentaries have become part of the summer-movie landscape, thanks to the robust business done by Fahrenheit 9/11 in 2004 and March of the Penguins last year. Docs can hit audiences where all the best movies do: in the heart, in the gut. Here are five of this summer's essays in political outrage and personal triumph.

WORDPLAY

Ken Burns sees the New York Times crossword puzzle as "a set of boxes in which you practice the wordplay of this particularly exquisite language." Bill Clinton solves his Times crosswords as he would a political problem: "You start with what you know the answer to, and you just build on it." Jon Stewart begins a Tuesday puzzle with such confidence, "I'm gonna do it in glue stick."

These eminences (all left-handed; explain) are among the legion of Will Shortz's subjects. Shortz, the Times's crossword editor, is a genial gent who since 1978 has run an annual tournament for the sort of people who can finish a Sunday puzzle in 10 min.--in ink. Their number include Ellen Ripstein, a self-described "little nerd girl," and Tyler Hinman, who at 20 could become the tournament's youngest-ever winner.

Patrick Creadon's fizzy documentary uses interviews, tournament lore and some very cunning graphics to capture all the obsessive excitement of word love. The movie screen is a box too, and this film is as smart and funny as its topic and its stars. Release date: June 16

THE HEART OF THE GAME

Seattle coach Bill Resler calls his Roosevelt High girls' basketball team a "pride of lions." Which sounds simple and uplifting until he explains that in the jungle, female lions leave the males and go prowling to "kill and devour" their foe. His offensive strategy: he has none, instead establishing a pressing defense that exhausts the opponent.

Ward Serrill's feel-good doc, which covers seven years in the life of Resler's Roughriders, is hobbled by a narration so syrupy, it could be poured on pancakes. But the movie soars because of the sport's natural drama (every game seems to come down to a last, desperate shot) and its luck in finding a complex heroine. Darnellia Russell, the rare black girl on a white team, has dimples, drive and enough problems to fill an afterschool special. The film can't help touching on issues of race, child abuse and teen pregnancy, even as it out-Hoosiers Hoosiers with a real-life parable of improbable victory. Girls have hoop dreams too. And dreams can come true at the final buzzer. Release date: June 9

WHO KILLED THE ELECTRIC CAR?

Tom Hanks trumpeted its arrival. Ed Begley Jr. mourned its passing. When you realize that the film is narrated by a liberal President of the U.S. (well, Martin Sheen, who plays one on TV), you may suspect that the electric car was another ego trip for Hollywood's preachy leftists. But even Mel Gibson, no liberal, touts the vehicle's benefits. And when you hear the litany--it's clean, quiet and rechargeable at home, and, best of all, it doesn't rely on a product found in some of the least stable, most despotic nations on earth--you start thinking maybe it was a good idea. So why did General Motors, having invested a billion dollars in electric cars, not only pull the plug on them but also recall and destroy virtually every one?

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 Guantanamo, 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.

Michael Winterbottom, who co-directed the movie with Mat Whitecross, has fashioned a most adventurous filmography. He has made period tragedies (Jude) and comedies (Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story), but his true metier is the political docudrama set in lands scorched by war: Bosnia for Welcome to Sarajevo, Afghanistan for In This World. The Road to Guantanamo is his most unsparing statement yet of war's brutalizing effect on both the prisoner and his jailer.

"It either destroys you or makes you stronger," Iqbal says of his incarceration. "I think it made me stronger." If the movie's remorseless depiction of this nightmare doesn't shock audiences into numbness--United 93 is a Hallmark card compared with this horror show--they may be inspired by the stubborn bravery of Iqbal and his friends. Documents like this are supposed to open our eyes, even if we would rather shut them to the awful realities on view. Release date: June 23