LOS ANGELES: A new documentary which looks at the Iraq war coverage by Arab satellite network Al Jazeera is receiving positive reviews in the US press as it hits art house theatres nationwide Friday.

The movie takes a behind-the scenes look at the network's control room and weaves that viewpoint against attempts by the US military to tightly control the flow of information about the closely covered conflict.

"'Control Room' may be the first movie of the year to qualify as urgently important," wrote the Washington Post critic Ann Hornaday. "Thoughtful, carefully calibrated and often infuriating, this engrossing portrait of competing notions of truth is at once a thrilling real-time chronicle of the birth of a free press and a sophisticated philosophical treatise on the nature of objective reality."

Egyptian-American director Jehane Noujiam followed Al Jazeera from a month prior to the US invasion and manages to show how remarkably skewed US press coverage of the war was.

She also reveals that US President George Bush administration's frequent demonization of the powerful Arab news network was often inaccurate, and that AL Jazeera's journalists were usually at least as committed to telling the truth as their vaunted Western counterparts.

"Viewers of this remarkable documentary will be disconcerted by a glimpse of a world where everything is reversed, where our most cherished preconceptions are called into question and reality proves to be a more complex business than we imagined," wrote Kenneth Turan, the film critic of the Los Angeles Times.

The documentary earned high marks for accurately portraying three men who emerge as stars of the movie. All express the internal contradictions of their situations.

One is Samir Khader, Al Jazeera's soft-spoken senior producer who, although sympathetic to Arab nationalism, is deeply committed to the role of the press in a free society and the basic tenets of Western democracy.

"Between us, if I'm offered a job at Fox, I will take it to exchange the Arab nightmare for the American dream," he confides.-dpa