Owen Gleiberman, film critic for Entertainment Weekly magazine reviews "Green Zone."

It would be a shame if Paul Greengrass, the director of the new Iraq war film Green Zone, became known mostly for using so much hand-held shaky-cam that it's as if every scene he ever shot took place in the middle of a minor earthquake.

Greengrass, of course, directed two of the Bourne thrillers, but he also made Bloody Sunday and United 93, films in which the fake-documentary style reinforced the raw factual reality of the stories they were telling. At first, Green Zone looks like more of the same. It's set in Baghdad a few weeks after the 2003 U.S. invasion. Matt Damon, with his terse, tight-lipped resolve, plays Roy Miller, an army chief warrant officer who discovers the concealed bunkers that he'd been told house Saddam's weapons of mass destruction are all empty. There are no WMDs to be found.

Green Zone, despite its explosively unstable setting, is structured as a classic whistleblower tale, with Miller cutting through the lies and deceptions that run up the U.S. chain of command. Greg Kinnear plays a Pentagon weasel seemingly modeled on the Bush administration flunky Paul Bremner, and Amy Ryan is a Wall Street Journal reporter who's an obvious stand-in for the New York Times' Judith Miller.

Green Zone has some exciting nighttime firefight sequences, but the trouble with the movie is that it's a liberal-left Hollywood concoction pretending to be a docudrama. By the time everyone starts to chase after one of Saddam's former generals, the most dramatic question on screen isn't, Will they find him?, but rather, Is this guy real, or did the movie invent him?

Green Zone is a thriller that makes you feel as if you're racing around and around, just to catch up with old headlines.