CRITICS’PICKS

Errol Morris has done something quite unusual in this new documentary. He’s taken the prison everyone’s heard of, the photographs everybody’s seen and the torture that people are either ashamed of or in denial about and looked at it all with such a fierce specificity that to experience his film is to feel like we haven’t focused on those things at all. “Standard Operating Procedure” is not the first documentary on Iraq. It’s not the first film on America’s embrace of torture as a weapon of choice. It’s not even the first picture to focus on the notorious Abu Ghraib prison. What it is is the first time Morris has looked at these issues, and that makes the difference.