Frankenstein in Baghdad

A documentary about the American war in Vietnam, made while the war was still being fought. Davis intercuts interviews with generals, officials, pilots, veterans, grieving Vietnamese families and ordinary Americans, setting the language of policy against what that policy did on the ground and at home.

Why it’s here: The punk move is the editing: Davis lets the war's architects talk at length, then cuts their words against a funeral, a bombed village or a cheering football crowd, and trusts the audience to feel the gap. The pedagogy is in how the film teaches viewers to hear the language of power, euphemism and abstraction included, while looking at what it covers up. Worth knowing that the juxtaposition is the argument, and General Westmoreland and others objected that their words were framed unfairly, so watch it as a persuasive documentary, not a neutral record.

Four British Muslim men in Sheffield decide to become suicide bombers. Omar is sincere and sharp, Waj is a follower, Barry is a loudmouth convert, and Faisal is trying to train crows to carry explosives. A training trip to Pakistan goes badly wrong, the plan changes shape again and again, and the target ends up being the London Marathon.

Why it’s here: The punk move is the target: Morris takes the most feared subject of the decade and finds the comedy in it, aiming the joke at the ideology and the men chasing it, not at Muslims as a group. After about three years of research with police, terrorism experts and imams, and with British Muslim writers and actors shaping the script, the film sees would-be bombers as sad, bickering, self-important and heartbreakingly human. The pedagogy is in that last part. It shows how a movement offers a lost young man a place and a purpose, how group pressure and ego drive the plan more than belief does, and how the authorities' own blunders belong to the same farce. It treats a suicide bombing as the end of the joke, which is why the ending is hard to watch. Critics split, and some found it a miss, but it makes a useful companion to any serious reading on radicalization.