It is not so much a documentary as a fictional film about the making of a documentary, or perhaps a documentary about the making of a fictional film about the making of a documentary.
"Where in the World Is Osama bin Laden?" is not so much a documentary as the movie equivalent of a nonfiction stunt book.
If you do, however, you'll at least receive a masterclass in what's wrong with so much modern documentary television: desperate references to popular culture; hopeful stoking of barely existing drama; and an unnecessary soundtrack.
In other words, the play is not so much a documentary as theatrical journalism, an attempt to tell a true story in a way that would be more difficult in another medium.
Mr. Sloan said one of the pleasures of revisiting "WTC View" almost 10 years after 9/11 was that he saw his play now not so much as documentary theater but more as a study of "characters on the verge of adulthood who are facing choices that have nothing to do with 9/11".
Note to anyone thinking of making a documentary-style film about an up-and-coming rock band: if one of the people you have repeatedly testifying to the band's greatness is its own manager, what you're making is not so much a documentary as a prolonged promotional video.
But the film is concerned not so much with documentary accuracy as with recapturing the spirit of a potent historical moment, à la Michael Frayn's play "Copenhagen," in which questions of conscience and culpability are refracted through the prism of personality and individual choice.
The film is not so much a documentary as a portrait -- a diptych -- of two men living together with health issues, trying to make a living together selling clay dolls.
In the end, however, there is only so much one documentary about a historic event like the Egyptian Revolution can hope to accomplish, and Noujaim's achievement is not a minor one.
