(Opens Fri March 7, Clinton Street Theater)

This documentary walks through the United State's relationship with Iraq, using documents and interviews you probably didn't catch on CNN. Its best feature is to condense the (continuing) Saddam saga into a cohesive narrative. This makes it a clarified, digestible recap. It's helpful, if speedy, in summarizing perspectives that are familiar, and regurgitated by innumerable sources. The film's revelations are hardly unheard of, but it offers further documented evidence of governmental manipulations that the U.S. has oft been accused of. The effect is hugely disheartening, a purgatorial review of this country's past and continuing transgressions. If you or someone you know isn't already resolved to the idea of the U.S. government being saturated with corrupted, sinister dirtbags, this will film will probably help. Or, if you're a visual learner and won't believe in dead Iraqi children until you see all the dead Iraqi children, this will help. MARJORIE SKINNER

The Safety of Objects

(Opens Fri March 7, Fox Tower)

The distraught lives of weird suburban parents and the parents' weirder kids are intertwined through divorce, backseat teenage sex, yoga, and most importantly, a tragic auto accident that leaves a young man in a coma in this deeply unsatisfying drama.

The fractured lives, furtive affairs, creepy kids, and stunted sexuality of the suburban set is not new terrain, and this flick gives the genre a bad reading. A spiraling lawyer finds redemption as a 24-hour personal trainer for a woman in a "hands on a hardbody" SUV contest at the local mall. A pre-pubescent boy is literally having an affair with his sister's Barbie doll. The whole movie is stuff like that. However, one subplot--a darkly realistic child abduction involving the neighborhood handyman (Timothy Olyphant) and the neighborhood tomboy (Kristen Stewart)--is well scripted and acted, giving an otherwise soupy movie some stock. Just not nearly enough to warrant a recommendation. JOSH FEIT