Taxi To The Dark Side review

After a screening on BBC TV last year (albeit in a slightly shortened form), Alex Gibney’s doc now gets its cinematic release. Gibney made the scathing Enron: The Smartest Guys In The Room and brings the same scrupulous research and controlled sense of anger to bear on Taxi To The Dark Side. His starting point is young Afghan taxi driver Dilawar, who in 2002 wound up in the US-run jail at Bagram. After five days he was dead, his legs looking as if they’d been run over by a truck. The director widens out from this case to take in the American-run Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo prisons, along with the whole murky, shifting attitude to ‘interrogation’ sanctioned by Bush’s regime. This is powerful, principled filmmaking from a director who hates what’s being done to his country – and what his country is doing to the rest of the world.