Opens: November 14 in cinemas, November 29 on Amazon Prime streaming TV
Genre: Political drama/thriller
Duration: 120 minutes

The first half of this story about a real-life US Senate inquiry into America’s use of torture after the 9/11 terrorist attacks is dry, over-complicated and dramatically flaccid. If you can weather that, it does eventually become more compelling when events mutate into a David vs Goliath struggle between its obsessive and principled hero, inquiry member Dan Jones (played by Adam Driver), and the CIA.

Director-writer Scott Z Burns, an associate of Steven Soderbergh, seems to have intended a counterweight to Kathryn Bigelow’s CIA thriller Zero Dark Thirty, which was criticised for arguing that US torture played a vital role in finding Osama Bin Laden.

The Report reaches the opposite conclusion: that not only did so-called “enhanced interrogation techniques” not lead to the location of the head of Al-Qaida, it didn’t produce a single piece of information that deterred other attacks.

From the middle onwards, the story clicks into gear as the CIA deploys its institutional power to try to crush...