HMMM....I SEE BLOGGER HAVE CHANGED THINGS YET AGAIN. NOW I HAVE NO ACCESS TO FONT CHANGES OR BOLD ETC. GRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR. NOT HAPPY!!!!!

Written and directed by Michael Moore
Rated M

Fahrenheit 9/11 is as infuriating as it is disturbing.

Michael Moore has assembled a great raft of accusations in his personal indictment of George Bush's presidency, enough to make the blood boil, but his arguments are often slippery, based on suggestion and innuendo rather than hard fact.

Moore is a polemicist, as ruthless in his pursuit of an agenda as those he accuses, and this leads him into murky waters where he translates suggestions into fact.

He argues that the Bush family's business connections to the family of Osama bin Laden, one of the richest in Saudi Arabia, are a hidden reason that Bush was slow to act after 9/11, but he establishes no firm link between the bin Laden family money and the Bush family. He suggests that the US Attorney-General, John Ashcroft, did not act on FBI intelligence suggesting that bin Laden's operatives were planning attacks on American targets using planes, but never establishes that this intelligence reached Ashcroft. The film leaves you with no doubt that it did.

Fahrenheit 9/11 is more successful when it simply counts the cost of the American war in Iraq by talking to the mother of an American soldier killed in action.

Michael Pederson died in the crash of a Black Hawk helicopter. His mother, Lila Lipscomb, a woman who counts herself a patriot, reads from her son's last letter, criticising the war.

"I really hope they don't re-elect that fool," he writes a few weeks before his death. She later breaks down outside the White House. "My son, my son," she wails, bending over with grief.

The film has many moments of humour, but perhaps fewer than in his previous efforts, Bowling for Columbine and Roger & Me. His blood is up, and this makes the film both more heartfelt and more powerful than his previous efforts.