The truth is paramount

Today and next week, two powerful new films are released that epitomise all that is best about the wave of award-winning documentaries hitting the box office. First comes Errol Morris's Oscar-winning Fog of War, about the life of Robert McNamara, controversial US defence secretary during the Vietnam era. Based on interviews with the 84-year-old, it provides a chilling reminder of the dangers of war and human fallibility.

Next week sees the release of Andrew Jarecki's Oscar-nominated Capturing The Friedmans, a harrowing tale about the disintegration of an American family in the Eighties, as the father and a teenage son are accused of sexually abusing schoolboys. Using footage of the family's home movies, it is an unsettling picture of community hysteria and coercive police, wrapped in a family tragedy.

Brilliant and provocative films, then? Not according to critics who say they are biased, misleading and incorrect. And so, at the moment of its greatest creative flowering, the documentary film is being attacked for its honesty as never before.

Great stories are the essential ingredient of this recent success, but now directors have appropr i ated the strategies of Hollywood cinema. Handheld cameras and fly-on-the-wall filming have been ditched for cinematic imagery, dramatic narratives and symphonic soundtracks, making them more engaging than anything else on the big screen.

But this creative mix raises the question of how far the films' success, with their stylistic brio, has been achieved at the cost of seeking the truth. Has the documentary been Hollywoodised?

This is clearly a golden age for documentaries. No Hollywood thriller, for example, has generated more nervewracking tension than the finals of the children's spelling contest in Jeff Blitz's Spellbound, which explores the lives of children taking part in a nationwide competition. Nor is any action film more terrifying than Touching the Void, Kevin MacDonald's climbing drama.

With this acclaim comes the sort of box office takings the genre has never been used to. Bowling for Columbine, Michael Moore's polemic against gun ownership in America, has made £30 million worldwide, while the award-winning Touching the Void has made £2 million at the UK box office.

But the first signs of trouble began with Moore's piece. Many accuse it of being full of factual errors and deliberately misleading scenes. There have even been requests for Moore to hand back his Oscar. Likewise, Fog of War has offended many who feel that McNamara has been allowed to present his story without any contradictory testimonies.

But with its potent mix of unspeakable

crimes against children, Capturing the Friedmans is the most controversial. By letting the participants speak for themselves, it became a mosaic of views and perspectives, brimming with unreliable narrators and false trails. The film undermines viewers' attempts to find neat explanations and attribute guilt.

Supporters of the Friedman family say the film does not adequately portray how the police mishandled the case, while child advocacy groups, police and prosecutors claim Jarecki understates the evidence of the Friedmans' guilt. The family's victims even wrote to the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, accusing the director of twisting the facts in the film to make it appear that they had lied.