In spite of having a team of critics watching and reviewing films at Sundance, Iraq in Fragments, which ended up sweeping the Sundance documentary competition, slipped through the Cinematical cracks. When I saw the film was screening last week in Seattle as part of the Seattle Arab and Iranian Film Festival, I immediately made plans to catch it. I knew very little about the film in advance, but given the popularity of political documentaries at film festivals, I suppose I was expecting Iraq in Fragments to be a film about how the United States is destroying Iraq.  What I saw instead was a beautifully shot portrait of the human side of Iraq -- the differences that divide Iraq's Shia, Sunni and Kurdish population, and the similarities that, as is so often the case in cultures around the world, get overlooked in the need to identify with a group. For there to be an "us", it seems, there must be a "them", and in the Iraq of the moment, that need to define by differences seems to be prevalent.

Director James Longley first went to Iraq before the U.S. invasion, but found it impossible at that time to get permission to film. He returned in 2003 and spent the next two years living and filming in Iraq, gathering the stories that would ultimately become the pieces of Iraq in Fragments. Longley, in his director's notes for the film, insists that he wasn't looking to make a political film or a war documentary, but a film about the people living in Iraq. He filmed six stories, three of which became the framework for the the film, one each from the Sunni, Shia and Kurdish populations of Iraq -- groups that, with the fall of Sadaam Hussein and the demise of the Baathist regime, are struggling for power and autonomy within their country even as the United States struggles to maintain its own control.

• Bukowski: Born in to This - There is a morbidly fascinating fly-on-the-wall vibe that pervades John Dullaghan's profile of the late Beat writer Charles Bukowski, a base familiarity that parallels the Ham On Rye author's own inimitable hard-lived life and style. Epic in scope (and length), first-time director Dullaghan compiles dozens of meticulously screened hours of archival footage, coupling the best of it with new interviews with Bukowski survivors to present a terrifically real character study of a little-studied real character. The watchable Chuck-alike Happy Hour, starring Anthony LaPaglia as a booze-addled writer, is also just out.

The Great Ecstasy of Robert Carmichael is absolutely horrifying. Loaded with easy cynicism and even easier sadism, it's a beautifully orchestrated, ideological disaster that shoots for social commentary but settles for lowest-blow shock. From what I can tell, the film premiered at Cannes in 2005 and has been making the rounds of European film festivals ever since – making its inclusion in the Narrative Competition here somewhat curious. 25-year-old first-time writer-director Thomas Clay was scheduled to make an appearance at last night's Austin premiere, but failed to show – a bizarre move for a filmmaker seemingly so desperate to confront is audience.