James Fallows, who wrote Blind Into Baghdad, is recommending No End In Sight, a new documentary on the war in Iraq:

Next week Charles Ferguson’s documentary No End in Sight opens in DC and New York, followed in August by “select other cities.” It is worth making time to see this film.

…My deeper bias might seem to work against the film. It covers almost exactly the same terrain, including many of the same sources and anecdotes, as did my book Blind Into Baghdad. But rarely have I seen a clearer demonstration of how much more powerful the combination of pictures, sound, music, real-people-talking, etc can be than words on a page. (Update: I’m not denigrating print, to which I’ve devoted my professional life — and which, indeed, is the medium through which big ideas about the world are generally changed. But there are times when the experience of seeing, for instance, chaos on the streets of Baghdad transcends any mere verbal description of it.)

I don’t know whether the highly-publicized Sicko is any good: hasn’t shown up in the pirate-video stores here yet. But if you’re looking for an auteur-produced, both intellectually and emotionally powerful, public-affairs-related documentary film, I say: try this one first.

Here’s the preview: