'The Report' will hopefully force us to remember our role in torture

The Report is an unsensational movie about a sensational topic -- the exposure of the Bush era's torture tactics and how inhumane/ineffective they were -- and it feels especially timely given that prolonged attempts to rehabilitate the reputation of former President George W. Bush and his administration are already underway. There's a reason he's hanging out with Ellen DeGeneres in public, and not just because she's so nice.

Sanctioned torture was and is one of the most heinous aspects of the Bush presidency, but unlike Hurricane Katrina and the financial crisis -- it was largely something we heard described rather than witness or felt in our actual lives.

You can read that a terrorism suspect was waterboarded over 180 times and produced no actionable intelligence, but its another thing entirely to see it dramatized in stark, unromanticized living color. This is not a fun era to revisit, but it is a wholly necessary one.

For all its kinetic energy, Zero Dark Thirty -- to some -- left the door open to the possibility that these 'enhanced interrogation techniques may have occasionally produced valuable results, gratefully The Report leaves no room for any ambiguity. Its scenes of torture are particularly harrowing but also clearly nihilistic.

The film even takes a jab at how problematic that blockbuster movie was.

This is particularly important because we currently have a president who has not only praised techniques like waterboarding but has also proudly insisted that "torture works" -- this despite having no military or intelligence experience whatsoever.

You had people at the highest levels of government embracing the indefensible and then when the program was described as torture they simply redefined what torture was and lied about the results they were getting.

The Report does a very good, thorough job of conveying how outrageous all this was and is, not absolving the Obama administration either, although its heroes are Democrats. Meanwhile, Adam Driver is a terrific at channelling fury as audience surrogate Daniel Jones, a dogged investigator trying to get to the bottom of it, as is the always excellent Annette Bening, portraying the steely Sen. Diane Feinstein.

The movie itself is pretty workmanlike (and yes, a little preachy) -- it looks and feels like a very good television miniseries -- and perhaps its fitting that its a streaming Amazon release. This is not so much a thriller or a mystery as a sober reckoning for one of the worst chapters in our country's history.

It may feel smallish -- the drama centers on whether a blistering report on American torture tactics will get to see the light of day -- but it will hopefully inspire an important and necessary conversation about how we fail to learn from our mistakes -- across administrations.

In a way, a movie like this really makes the case for the value of A-list streaming content. It might never have found an audience in theaters -- but in the comfort of many peoples' homes, there will be an opportunity for viewers to really chew on what we did as a nation and why we failed to hold anyone accountable.