Iraq in Fragments

Langley's impeccably nonjudgmental camera knows exactly what details to record. Drawn from more than 300 hours of footage, the film's all too brief 94 minutes mesmerizes with its insight and, rarer still, its beauty.

The calm poetry of the cinematography offsets the mess of the politics to stunning effect.

A documentary of stunning immediacy and marvelous images.

A vivid, poetic evocation of life in post-invasion Iraq that works both as impressionistic collage and candid portraiture.

In addition to the interesting camera work, the documentary's undeniable appeal comes in how close Longley gets to the characters, who are all male.

Whether or not James Longley's boldly stylized reportage breaches public indifference, its enduring value is assured: When the war is long gone, this deft construction will persist in relevance, if not for what it says about the mess we once made, then as a model of canny cinematic construction.

As beautiful as it is unrevealing, James Longley's Iraq in Fragments rests on a debatable but firm premise -- that the embattled country is irrevocably separated by its three dominant groups, Shiites, Sunnis and Kurds -- but brings back nothing journalistically substantial from the war front .