Leavenworth

Formally, Leavenworth is straightforward. Don't let the "Soderbergh" brand name fool you into expecting aesthetic flourish. It's dominated by these talking heads and makes solid use of archival pictures and footage to open the story up a little, but it's talky to the degree you could almost just listen to it as a podcast.

The filmmakers — the series is directed by Paul Pawlowski, a veteran of sports broadcasts and documentaries, and Steven Soderbergh is an executive producer — present all of this with brisk competence. They frame the obvious paradoxes, such as how conservative support of Lorance entails casting the troops who testified against him as liars or pawns. They don’t establish a real point of view, though, or weave the divergent threads in a way that’s particularly surprising or moving.