Jake Gyllenhaal, Reese Witherspoon, Omar Metwally, Stellan Sarsgaard.

Running time: 112 mins . . . .

MAKE no mistake. Rendition isn't just a terrific eyegrabbing heart-wrenching political thriller. It also raises fundamental ethical dilemmas about the new post-9/11 world order. Director Gavin Hood, who won 2006's best foreign language Oscar with his debut feature Tsotsi, brilliantly cross-cuts between parallel storylines so that the lives of high-ranking officials on Capitol Hill in Washington and desperate young Muslims in Africa converge with harrowing consequences for a young American mother-to-be and her Egyptian-born husband.

Rendition is a story of love and betrayal and ruthless expediency delivered with an emotional force that doesn't let the audience off the hook. Like the characters, we are forced to decide whether torturing illegally seized suspects . . . however morally repellent the circumstances . . . can sometimes be necessary to help prevent further terrorist attacks.

Like the German public who saw trains taking Jews to extermination camps, nobody can claim not to know that this is going on. According to a European Parliament report earlier this year the CIA, with the complicity of many European countries including Ireland, has operated over 1,200 secret 'rendition' flights to third country destinations for the purpose of extracting information through torture outside the protection of the US or any other judiciary.

Much in the way Costa-Gavras exposed the barbarity of Pinochet's Chile through the eyes of an ordinary disbelieving middle American dad . . . played by Jack Lemmon . . . who goes there looking for his 'disappeared' son, Hood confronts the implications of the White House-approved policy of 'extraordinary rendition' by focusing on the story of an American mother-to-be, played compellingly by Reese Witherspoon, who goes to Washington airport with her small son to meet her Egyptian-born husband (Omar Metwally) on his return from an engineering conference in Cape Town only to be told that there is no record of him ever having made the flight.

What she doesn't know . . . but we do . . . is that he was arrested on arrival on suspicion of involvement in a suicide bombing in which a top CIA operative was killed. Mobile phone records allegedly suggest he has been in contact with a terrorist cell in Egypt.

"Polygraphs don't mean diddley, " says Meryl Streep, on being informed that he passed a lie detector test.

"Put him on the plane." He ends up naked and chained in a cell in an unnamed North African country, where a sceptical CIA analyst (Jake Gyllenhaal) is assigned to liaise with local police. "Are you monitoring the situation?" demands Streep, over the phone. "Yes, " he says, drily, "this is my first torture." "The US does not torture, " she snaps back.

Meanwhile, Witherspoon has enlisted the help of former a college friend (Stellan Sarsgaard) who is aide to an influential senator, played by Alan Arkin.

Rendition is convincing because none of the characters is a stereotype. Each is acting out of convictions, however misguided or expedient, that go some way to justifying what they are doing.

Streep is convinced from her intelligence feedback . . . the accuracy of which she doesn't question . . . that thousands of people may still be alive because of information gained by interrogation of suspects sent for rendition. "We save lives, " she says.

Gyllenhaal sees with his own eyes that intelligence gained through fear and under torture is not only inhuman and unethical but also ineffective. Like a classic Greek drama, Rendition is a conflict of right and right which is ultimately resolved by a woman who stubbornly refuses to give up and by a man she's never met who finds the courage follow his conscience rather than obey orders. Kelley Sane's script is intriguingly ambiguous, so that while the probability is that Omar Metwally is innocent there always remains a possibility that he isn't.

"Is he dirty?" Alan Arkin asks Sarsgaard, who is trying to get him to pressure on the CIA. "That's not the point, " says Sarsgaard. "The point is whether it's torture."

All the performances are terrific, particularly the supremely over-bearing Streep who carries on where she left off in The Devil Wears Prada.

"Jesus, it's 2am, " growls her husband when they're awoken by a call informing her about a terrorist atrocity. "I'm sure they arranged it just to spite you, " she retorts, tartly.

People keep complaining about Hollywood getting political. But with politics taken over by spin and soundbites, cinema is filling the gap left by a failure of parliament to provide a proper discourse for democracy.