Better This World

The stark reality of America’s post-9/11 surveillance state is laid bare in this riveting documentary. David McKay and Bradley Crowder, the ‘Texas Two’, were young activists whose misguided determination to disrupt the 2008 Republican Convention led to their incarceration on domestic terrorism charges. The resulting trials not only exposed a network of law enforcement mishaps, corrupt informants and travesties of justice, but revealed the adolescent machismo of the country’s haphazard resistance movement, all of which is covered here with the pace and intensity of a political thriller. But the film truly hits home in the final stages, as McKay is released on bail pending a retrial and visits his family in full knowledge that he’ll have to give himself up and return to prison: a sequence of astonishing pathos and dignity.