There is no nice or pretty way to tell a story about the systemic oppression and mistreatment of black people in the United States. It's fitting then that Kathryn Bigelow's " Detroit ," an account of the murders of three unarmed black men that took place in the Algiers Motel in late July 1967, is neither — it is an all-out assault on your senses and soul. 
 
 It's hard to overstate just how visceral and harrowing an experience it is. "Detroit" is a well-made and evocative film that is also numbingly brutal with little to no reprieve. And while it might be the only true way to tell this story, it's also one that is not going to be for everyone. The stomach-churning horror begins immediately and does not let up for 2 hours and 23 minutes. 
 
 To set the stage for the Algiers Motel, Bigelow begins by speeding through the history of black people in United States with animated acrylics and pounding music — emancipation, the great migration, white flight and the racist zoning practices that led to the overcrowding of black residents in urban pockets. Tensions have already reached a tipping point, and then in the summer of 1967, Detroit police bust an after-hours club in what would become the inciting incident for the riots. 
 
 Three days after the riots begin, a local singing group called The Dramatics are about to go on stage at a big, crowded theater hoping to get their big break, but are interrupted and sent home due to the events outside. The men exit the theater in their sparkly suits into what looks like a war zone. As they run through the streets they assure every cop who isn't already beating someone with a night stick that they're just on their way home. Bigelow shows all of this with handheld, ground level docudrama realism. There is no orienting yourself to the bigger picture, only what is right in front of you. 
 
 The charismatic lead singer Larry (Algee Smith) and his buddy Fred (Jacob Latimore) decide to peel off and get an $11 room at the Algiers and wait out the night. There they meet two white party girls, a veteran, Greene (a terrific Anthony Mackie), and a provocateur, Carl (Jason Mitchell), who plays around with a starter pistol that eventually catches the attention of the police in the area. The officers, who we've already learned are rotten, storm the motel on the hunt for the sniper they presume is there. 
 
 The local police, led by a maniacal, hotheaded racist, Krauss (played by the English actor Will Poulter), kills Carl immediately and then continue to terrorize the guests relentlessly with inhuman torture tactics in what seems like an endless sequence of horror upon horror until two more end up dead and they call it a night. 
 
 Bigelow collaborated again with screenwriter Mark Boal on "Detroit," which is perfectly evocative of this specific time and place, but lacking the perspective and illumination that one might hope a 50-year-old event would warrant. Perhaps they wanted to leave conclusions and interpreting to the audience, and as the film notes at the end, no one knows for certain what happened in the Algiers Motel and some of the scenes were pieced together and imagined by the filmmakers. 
 
 There is some nuance — in the National Guard officer who is horrified by the situation and the local security officer (John Boyega) who only wanted to ease tensions — but not nearly as much as Bigelow and Boal have previously achieved in "Zero Dark Thirty" and "The Hurt Locker." 
 
 Also very little insight is given to the victims' lives outside of this event. Maybe that's not the point, though. Maybe anger is all you're supposed to feel when you step outside the theater. Maybe not feeling satisfied with "Detroit" is the point. 
 
 This was America, you think. This is still America. And the movies can't offer a resolution that history hasn't. 
 
 "Detroit," an Annapurna Pictures release, is rated R by the Motion Picture Association of America for "strong violence and pervasive language." Running time: 143 minutes. Three stars out of four. 
 
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 MPAA Definition of R: Restricted. Under 17 requires accompanying parent or adult guardian. 
 
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 Follow AP Film Writer Lindsey Bahr on Twitter: www.twitter.com/ldbahr ||||| In Harrowing 'Detroit,' Kathryn Bigelow Mixes Brutal Facts With Fiction 
 
 Enlarge this image toggle caption Francois Duhamel/Annapurna Francois Duhamel/Annapurna 
 
 Twenty-two years ago, Kathryn Bigelow made Strange Days — a paranoid thriller written and produced by her former spouse James Cameron, set in the then-future of 1999. Inspired in part by the 1992 Los Angeles riots — which were sparked by the acquittal of the LAPD officers who'd beaten Rodney King near to death — the movie's plot involved the murder of black hip-hop artist "Jeriko One" by a pair of white Los Angeles cops. 
 
 As ambitious as it was unwieldy, Strange Days flopped so hard that Bigelow's career took years to recover. But she landed on her feet, becoming the first and so far only woman to win the Academy Award for best director, for the Iraq war movie The Hurt Locker, which also won best picture. Her follow-up, Zero Dark Thirty, got a Best Picture nod, too. And that's how a sexagenarian woman in Hollywood earns the juice to make a movie like the incendiary new Detroit — Bigelow's vivid, inevitably divisive reenactment of a real 1967 incident wherein three Motor City police officers were charged in the killings of three adolescent black men while the city was under martial law following riots. 
 
 Seemingly in a position to make any movie she wanted, she chose a lightly fictionalized historical drama that bares a striking resemblance to her little-seen Angela Bassett-starring sci-fi flick from 1995. (Strange Days even climaxes in a riot touched off by white police using excessive force on a black suspect, which is where Detroit begins.) 
 
 Until now, the highest-profile accounting of what happened that night was John Hersey's 1968 book The Algiers Motel Incident. (Hersey's estate declined to sell Bigelow and screenwriter Mark Boal the rights, The New York Times reported.) Detroit isn't as dispassionate as that. Just as the movie Hidden Figures buffed and polished the story told in the eponymous nonfiction book for maximum uplift, Detroit heats and sharpens the facts that formed it for maximum outrage. 
 
 Not that those facts weren't outrageous already: In the case Detroit revisits, the cops were acquitted after the confessions they gave and then recanted were ruled inadmissible in court. That's a cruel irony, because it was in their attempt to coerce confessions from the young men they'd confined in Detroit's Algiers Motel — a $6-a-night flophouse that the law considered a den of sin —that those out-of-control cops resorted to intimidation, torture, and finally murder. (The presence of two white girls from Ohio among all those black men appeared to inflame the cops' further — they accused the women of prostitution, stripping and beating them.) The police claimed a sniper had fired upon them from inside the motel, but they never recovered a rifle from the scene. Detroit subscribes to accounts from several witnesses that the shots that summoned the police came from a starter pistol fired first as a stupid prank, then as an impotent and costly gesture of defiance. Carl Cooper, the 17-year-old who'd allegedly fired it, was the first to die that night. 
 
 One of the witnesses who testified for the prosecution, and who said he was assaulted by the accused policemen himself at the Algiers, was a musician. Singer Larry Reed quit his vocal group The Dramatics after that hellish night in 1967; the group broke out a few years later and had a long career without him. (They're still touring.) Reed was one of the incident's key figures that frequent Bigelow collaborator Boal interviewed while working on the movie. And though Boal's research team included Pulitzer Prize-winning Detroit Free Press reporter David Zeman, he has used his artistic license to plug some gaps in the legal record. (Other limits on the film's authenticity were merely budgetary, like the fact that tax incentives resulted in most of Detroit being filmed on location in... Boston.) 
 
 Boal's script commingles real and fictional people: Real-life witnesses Melvin Dismukes, Julie Hysell, and Larry Reed (played onscreen by John Boyega, Hannah Murray, and Algee Smith, respectively), are represented, but the brutal cops in the movie have different names than the officers who were eventually acquitted of the Algiers Motel killings. Their ringleader is played by Will Poulter, a redheaded, freckled 24-year-old English actor whose permanently right-angled eyebrows make him look like the satanic cousin of MAD magazine mascot Alfred E. Neuman. "We've failed these people," he says early in the film, sounding like a peace-loving Hubert Humphrey voter moments before he fatally shoots one of "these people" in the back on suspicion of stealing groceries. A detective tells him he's recommending that the District Attorney file murder charges against him, but Poulter's character is sent right back out to active duty in the meantime. Did this really happen? Well, there was a riot on. 
 
 Other credulity-straining aspects of Detroit appear to be factual: For one thing, Dismukes, a private security guard called in to protect a store near the Algiers from looters, was allowed to enter the Algiers with a weird coalition of Detroit cops and National Guardsmen and remain at a crime scene for hours while trying, ineffectually, to prevent the cops from brutalizing their suspects. (Boyega radiates Denzel-like calm in the face of the storm, proving that the way he livened the The Force Awakens was no fluke — he's a bonafide movie star. And to see him in a role where he's essentially helpless is unusual, and compelling.) In real life, Dismukes was charged with the felonious assault of two of the suspects and tried before any of the three cops accused of more serious offenses were; an all-white jury acquitted him. To the extent Detroit addresses this, it implies an unsuccessful attempt by the police to frame Dismukes for their own wrongdoing. 
 
 I'm also curious to know whether another one of its plot points is historical or invented: When Michigan State Police arrive at the Algiers, the ranking officer among them decides he wants no part of the "civil rights mix-up" the Detroit P.D. has already created, so the state troopers just drive away. What's the expression? Huge if true. 
 
 Bigelow and Boal's recreation of a 50-year-old police brutality case seems bound to be as controversial as their last project, 2012's Zero Dark Thirty. Accused in some quarters of defending the C.I.A.'s use of torture in its decade-long hunt for Osama Bin Laden, Zero Dark Thirty was really more of a high-tone Rorshach blot for each viewer's opinion of the endless War on Terror. Bigelow has always gone for immersion before reflection or judgment. 
 
 "I don't think it's up to the filmmaker to judge," the director told Washington Post chief film critic Ann Hornaday in a profile published last week. And it's not as though she's only just become interested in identity politics or policing: Long before her metamorphosis into an Oscar-winning maker of Important Films, she made 1990's Blue Steel, a sordid thriller that starred Jamie Lee Curtis as a rookie patrol officer who comes under suspicion after she kills a robbery suspect whose weapon can't be found. It's not a particularly good movie, nor one that would remotely satisfy any 2017 test of its wokeness, but it is at least more evidence that Bigelow was thinking about the problems of policing even when she was just making pulp films. 
 
 Bigelow's quasi-journalistic style has long alienated some viewers; now it's infuriating them, too. Chicago critic Angelica Jade Bastien slammed Detroit as "soulless," claiming it isn't harsh enough in its condemnation of the misconduct it depicts so mercilessly. Some of her specific complaints about Boal's screenplay — that it makes Melvin Dismukes "too passive a character," or that "there are also brief, disconcerting moments that present some white cops in a great light" — come from the moments where Boal hews closest to the firsthand accounts Dismukes and Reed shared with him. Dismukes says he did all he could to prevent the bloodshed, which wasn't much, and Reed says that after he fled the Algiers he was picked up and taken to the hospital by a cop—one who wasn't involved in the nightmare at the hotel. Molding facts into the emotional construct we refer to when use the word story is messy work, even when it's done in good faith. 
 
 I've seen Detroit only once, but I'm of the option that Bigelow and Boal have done that good but messy work, resulting in a movie that is maddeningly imperfect but still honorable. The movie opens with a semi-animated sequence that fashions Jacob Lawrence's "Migration Series" of paintings into a primer on the mass movement of African-Americans from the rural south to the urban north and west after World War I, and the subsequent white flight to the suburbs. That meant that by the 1960s, Detroit was a majority-black city with a majority-white police force. 
 
 It's to Bigelow's credit that she doesn't survey the worlds in which she sets her movies in schematic screenwriting terms: Detroit's early scenes, wherein a police raid on an unlicensed nightclub that's hosting a party for returning veterans sparks a riot, includes a few left turns — one of the black party guests who mouths off to the "pigs" turns out to be a narc, for example. This detail serves no narrative purpose; it only serves to underscore the absence of trust between the police and the citizens they're sworn to protect and serve. Editor Billy Goldenberg splices in documentary footage with the newly-shot material in this section of the movie, creating a panorama of the climate of mortal fear and volcanic anger between the citizens and the police. 
 
 We begin to get our bearings when Reed (Algee Smith) and The Dramatics prepare to perform on a revue at the Fox Theatre where they know a Motown A&R; scout will be in the audience. When the police order the performance stopped and the Fox evacuated, and then their bus home is set upon by rioters, Reed and his friend Fred Temple (Jacob Latimore) make the ill-fated decision to wait out the curfew poolside at the Algiers. 
 
 The police occupation of the Algiers forms the film's harrowing, quite long centerpiece. Bigelow uses all her gifts as a communicator of visceral sensation to summon the horror of spending a night under these vicious cops' bootheels. It's nauseating. By the time Anthony Mackie — playing an out-of-work Vietnam vet who gets thanked for his service by being beaten and spat on by cops — agrees never to speak of what he's witnessed, Bigelow and Boal have said all they have to say. 
 
 But Detroit continues on to depict the trial of the three officers, leaking tension as it does. If the intent of this section of the film is to illustrate that these cops are not bad apples but rather the functioning-as-designed armature of an inherently racist justice system, it's only partially successful. The tactics their lawyer (John Krasinski, weirdly) uses to discredit the prosecution's witnesses are as familiar as the Algiers scenes are revolting, and our rage circuits have already blown. 
 
 Maybe it's just impossible for even a scene-setter as skilled as Bigelow to do anything new in a courtroom. The coda she chooses, showing Larry Reed's resolution to continue his musical career in a far more modest fashion than before, has nothing to do with consoling the audience after 135 minutes of trauma. It's about Reed becoming a militant for peace. It's about him making a choice to survive. If nothing else, Detroit gets you thinking about how those might be the same thing. ||||| It focuses on a notorious act of white police brutality against mostly Black citizens, in a July 1967, siege at the Motor City’s Algiers Motel, where racism met frustration and blood was wantonly shed. Three young Black men were left dead and many questions were left unanswered. The mostly white Detroit Police Department emerged officially exonerated but not blameless. 
 
 The incident is set against the larger story of the Detroit riots of the same year, which left 43 people dead, nearly 1,200 injured and 7,200 arrested, as the National Guard along with city and state police combined to enforce law and order in a city literally burning from racial tensions. 
 
 No one would accuse the cops in Detroit of being “too nice,” although Bigelow and screenwriter Mark Boal — who previously teamed for Zero Dark Thirty and Oscar-winning The Hurt Locker — are careful not to demonize every authority figure. Many of the police and soldiers in the film are appalled by the acts of racism and violence they’re witnessing, among them the commanding officer of trigger-happy young patrol officer Philip Krauss, who is played by cherry-cheeked Will Poulter (The Revenant). 
 
 Despite civil-rights advances and eight years of an African-American U.S. president, the colour of a person’s skin can still determine everything from employment opportunities to treatment by police — who were recently encouraged by President Donald Trump to “please don’t be too nice” when dealing with crime suspects, wink, wink. 
 
 The injustice and anger behind it all feels like current reality, even a half-century on, making Detroit urgent viewing regardless of its character-development flaws. 
 
 Being appalled, however, isn’t the same as taking full ownership. The commander severely reprimands Krauss for fatally shooting a fleeing looter. He then allows the unrepentant patrolman to return to the streets. 
 
 Krauss later becomes the central antagonist of the Algiers Motel siege, which is sparked by a teen’s reckless firing of a starter’s pistol at a passing group of National Guardsmen. As cops and soldiers converge on the seedy establishment, seeking the sniper they believe hides inside, fate has also drawn in multiple unlucky bystanders, who thought they’d escaped the riots. 
 
 Among them are rising R&B singer Larry Reed (Algee Smith) and his friend Fred Simple (Jacob Latimore); private security guard Melvin Dismukes (John Boyega); a Vietnam vet named Greene (Anthony Mackie); and two white visitors from Ohio (Hannah Murray and Kaitlyn Dever), who picked a bad time and place to party. 
 
 That’s a lot of characters, and there are more, and here you have the central deficiency of Boal’s script: it tries to tell us everything about the circumstances without telling us much about the people. The film is less a character study and more of a situational one; a post-script notes that the Algiers Motel incident has never been fully explained. 
 
 Detroit opens with a roughly animated history lesson about how poor southern Blacks moved to white-dominated northern cities while affluent whites fled to the suburbs, taking the best jobs with them. The resulting powder keg of inequities exploded not just in Detroit, but across America. 
 
 And it led to situations like the motel standoff, which Bigelow and cinematographer Barry Ackroyd powerfully depict cinéma vérité style as a cascading series of bad choices, evil intentions and escalating violence. 
 
 Krauss and his fellow racist cops torture the rounded-up motel guests by beating them and threatening to shoot them one by one until the identity of the alleged sniper is disclosed. 
 
 Watching it unfold over the bulk of the film’s 143-minute running time makes for a grim sit, made all the more so by James Newton Howard’s minimalist score, which at times disappears altogether. Bigelow deserves credit for not trivializing the drama with a soundtrack packed with driving Motown tunes, although a version of Martha and the Vandellas’ “Nowhere To Run” is briefly heard in the film at one point. 
 
 You don’t need a big backbeat to drive images like these home; Detroit’s deep fury and essential message sears the eye and brain. ||||| On April 21, 2011, Mark Boal called the CIA to tell them he was going to Afghanistan. 
 
 The previous year, the screenwriter had been at a dinner when CIA director Leon Panetta asked Boal to alert the agency if he ever traveled to the country. At the time, Boal was working on a movie called Tora Bora, about the CIA's failure to capture Osama bin Laden in the immediate aftermath of the 9/11 attacks. The title referred to the region in eastern Afghanistan where the US felt it had let bin Laden slip through its fingers during a battle in December 2001. 
 
 But less than two weeks after Boal made the call, a team of Navy SEALs raided the al Qaeda leader's compound in Pakistan and killed him. Boal would not be going to Afghanistan after all. 
 
 Instead, he stopped writing the script for Tora Bora and began writing a different screenplay about what one lawmaker called "the most classified mission in history" — the killing of bin Laden. That movie, which Boal would work on with director Kathryn Bigelow, would become the 2012 Oscar-winning film Zero Dark Thirty. And the CIA would play a huge role in the creation of the script. 
 
 * * * 
 
 The previously undisclosed detail about Boal's phone call to the CIA was included in more than 100 pages of internal CIA documents obtained exclusively by VICE News in response to a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit. The documents contain the most detailed information to date about the controversial role the CIA played in the production of Zero Dark Thirty (ZDT). 
 
 Included in the trove of redacted agency records is a March 2014 CIA Office of Inspector General report titled "Alleged Disclosure of Classified Information by Former D/CIA" — D/CIA refers to the director of the Central Intelligence Agency, Leon Panetta — and a separate September 2013 report from the inspector general's office titled "Potential Ethics Violations Involving Film Producers." 
 
 The ethics report contains remarkable details about how Bigelow and Boal gave CIA officers gifts and bought them meals at hotels and restaurants in Los Angeles and Washington, DC — much of which initially went unreported by the CIA officers — how they won unprecedented access to secret details about the bin Laden operation, and how they got agency officers and officials to review and critique the ZDT script. 
 
 Related: The Weird Saga of the Other 'Smoking Gun' Torture Report the CIA Still Has Under Wraps 
 
 Representative Peter King, the Republican congressman from New York and the former chairman of the House Committee on Homeland Security, had pressed the inspectors general at CIA and Department of Defense in August 2011, a month after Panetta left the CIA to serve as secretary of defense, to investigate the alleged disclosures to Boal and Bigelow. This came after news reports claimed that high-ranking Obama administration officials granted the filmmakers extraordinary access to classified details about the bin Laden operation, and that the disclosures led to the arrests of Pakistanis who assisted the CIA in the operation. King's objections were centered around the fact that the movie was originally slated for release a month before the 2012 presidential election — it ended up premiering in December — and that it would have been used by Obama's reelection campaign. 
 
 The CIA worked with Bigelow and Boal at a time when the agency's so-called enhanced interrogation program was under scrutiny by Democrats on the Senate Intelligence Committee. They were working on what came to be known as the Senate torture report, about the efficacy of the techniques to which CIA captives were subjected. The report concluding that those techniques did not yield unique or actionable intelligence and had nothing to do with tracking down bin Laden. ZDT, however, strongly suggested that the use of torture led the agency to bin Laden, a narrative that current and former CIA officials promoted in numerous op-eds and interviews after bin Laden was killed. That the narrative was so prominently featured in ZDT angered Senator Dianne Feinstein, the Democratic chairwoman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, who fired off a letter to the president of Sony Pictures objecting to what she called a "false narrative." 
 
 To this day, the CIA vigorously defends its use of so-called "enhanced interrogation." This week, several former agency officials, including one who met with Bigelow and Boal, are releasing a book titled Rebuttal that defends the agency's enhanced interrogation program and harshly criticizes the Senate Intelligence Committee's report. 
 
 * * * 
 
 The inspector general's reports said the CIA's working relationship with the filmmakers began in 2010, a year before bin Laden was killed. 
 
 "Based on a review of documentation and interviews, the inspector general's office determined the CIA's cooperation with filmmakers Mark Boal and Kathryn Bigelow began in 2010 when Panetta and Bigelow met at an event where Bigelow discussed her film project 'Tora Bora,' a film project involving the CIA's failure to capture [bin Laden], and Panetta offered the Agency's assistance." 
 
 Within days of bin Laden's death, Boal secured meetings with CIA officials and counterterrorism officers. According to the inspector general's report about potential ethics violations by CIA officers, Boal also sent a letter to George Little, then the director of the CIA's Office of Public Affairs (OPA), shortly after news broke about bin Laden's death. 
 
 Boal wished to discuss his new plan: Scrapping the script for Tora Bora and instead telling the story of how the CIA managed to find and kill bin Laden. Less than three weeks after bin Laden's death, Boal and Michael Feldman, a public relations representative for Tora Bora, met with CIA officials to discuss the new project. 
 
 The CIA inspector general said its investigators obtained 'conflicting information as to whether Panetta had knowledge Boal was in the audience at the time of the speech.' 
 
 Boal found out from the counterterrorism officers with whom he met that the CIA was going to hold a classified awards ceremony on June 24, 2011 to honor the individuals who were part of the team that hunted down bin Laden. 
 
 "Boal expressed interest in attending the ceremony and passed his request on to [a woman at the agency] for action," the CIA inspector general's report said. 
 
 The report added that the CIA gave Boal access to CIA personnel and facilities less than a month after bin Laden was killed in order to "further his research" for the ZDT screenplay. 
 
 In order to assist him in his research and in "capturing the atmospherics," a "continuation of his earlier meetings that were all 'blessed' by CIA officials" saw Boal invited to attend the CIA's classified bin Laden awards ceremony "held inside a large tent" outside of the main entrance of CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia. It was attended by about 1,300 people. 
 
 "The audience was a mixture of both overt and covert personnel from across the Intelligence Community, as well as personnel from DOD and Congress. [Navy SEALs] who conducted the [bin Laden] raid were also in attendance," the CIA inspector general's report said. 
 
 It's unknown exactly who at the CIA extended the formal invitation to Boal. The inspector general's report says the CIA's Office of Public Affairs, which acts as the agency's liaison to the entertainment industry, arranged to have Boal present at the awards ceremony and told him it was off the record. But the report also notes that the office of the Director of Central Intelligence "approved the invitation to Boal." 
 
 "While the [CIA Office of Inspector General] determined several senior CIA officers were aware Boal would be attending the [bin Laden] Operation Awards Ceremony, [the Office of Inspector General] was unable to ascertain who specifically authorized Boal's invitation," the report said. 
 
 When confronted by the CIA inspector general, Panetta said he had no idea that Boal was present at the awards ceremony. But the CIA inspector general said its investigators obtained "conflicting information as to whether Panetta had knowledge Boal was in the audience at the time of the speech." At least one CIA employee told the inspector general that Panetta "had foreknowledge of Boal attending the ceremony." 
 
 Panetta told investigators at the CIA's Office of Inspector General that he would have been unable to identify Boal at the awards ceremony because he had never met the screenwriter. But the inspector general discovered Panetta's story didn't check out. Along with the email Boal had sent Panetta in April 2011, the inspector general determined that Panetta previously met Boal at the May 2010 White House Correspondents' Association Dinner. In fact, Panetta was seated at the same table as Boal and Bigelow and, as the separate CIA inspector general report into potential ethics violations makes clear, instructed Boal and Bigelow to contact him when they were ready to begin working on their original bin Laden movie, Tora Bora. 
 
 Also seated with Boal, Bigelow, and Panetta was former US Senator Evan Bayh, a onetime member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, who four years later would lead a CIA "accountability review board" over claims that the CIA spied on Senate staffers and breached their computers while they were researching and compiling the torture report. The agency's inspector general had found CIA officers culpable; Bayh's accountability board review completely exonerated them. 
 
 Additionally, the CIA inspector general said, "Panetta first met Kathryn Bigelow, Boal's co-producer, around April 2010, at a dinner in Washington…. According to [redacted], Bigelow informed Panetta she was working on a movie project about the battle at Tora Bora." 
 
 A detailed timeline about the CIA's interaction with Bigelow and Boal identified the last communication as taking place on May 3, 2012, when a public affairs officer received "a call from the film's producers indicating the need to delay filming at [CIA] headquarters until late summer or early fall." 
 
 Panetta did not respond to VICE News' requests for comment. 
 
 A timeline detailing the CIA's interaction with Bigelow and Boal included in the inspector general's report. 
 
 The report said some CIA personnel feared Boal's presence at the bin Laden awards ceremony was not a good idea because he would be exposed to classified information contained in Panetta's speech, and asked for "assistance in warning Panetta." But another CIA employee told the inspector general it "never occurred to him that Boal's presence at the awards ceremony would pose a security problem." 
 
 (Some details about Panetta's disclosures to Boal were previously reported after the DoD's own inspector general report into the matter leaked two years ago. Moreover, the DoD has released documents that reveal that top military officials involved in the bin Laden operation also disclosed classified information to Bigelow and Boal.) 
 
 Panetta's prepared speech was classified "SECRET/NOFORN," which means "not releasable to any foreign nationals," and coordinated with the CIA's Office of Public Affairs "with the exception of several handwritten remarks made by" Panetta in the margins of the document. But the inspector general determined that Panetta's speech should have been classified "TOP SECRET" at the "sensitive compartmented level" because it contained classified information derived from the NSA and DoD. 
 
 The inspector general found that the "discrepancy in the classification of the speech was due to the fact that [redacted] did not coordinate the information in the speech with outside agencies beforehand." 
 
 "In his interview with the [Office of the Inspector General, the CIA employee who wrote portions of Panetta's speech] stated that he classified the speech SECRET based on information he received from the agency's Counterterrorism Center (CTC)," the inspector general's report said. "[Redacted] told [the Office of the Inspector General] that CTC notified him of the need to coordinate the information with NSA and DoD. However, [redacted] said that he elected not to coordinate the information due to the press of business at the time and that there was no requirement by [Office of Public Affairs] that speeches be coordinated ahead of time with outside agencies." 
 
 Panetta told the inspector general that he was unaware his speech contained classified information, though he later acknowledged that it contained information classified at the "secret" level. Still, he played down the seriousness of the misclassification and the fact that classified details were revealed to Boal, who does not hold a security clearance, by stating that portions of his remarks had already been revealed by President Barack Obama and other government officials after bin Laden was killed. 
 
 "Panetta stated that the presence of information in such a manner contributed to a confusing situation with respect to what information was officially released and what was not," the inspector general's report said. 
 
 After the ceremony, Boal, who was not interviewed by the inspector general as part of its investigation, was introduced to Navy Admiral William McRaven, who led the SEAL team mission that killed bin Laden. CIA employees interviewed by the inspector general's investigators could not recall if Boal spoke with Panetta after the ceremony. 
 
 * * * 
 
 That was the start of the CIA's yearlong working relationship with Boal and Bigelow. According to the ethics report, at least 10 CIA National Clandestine Service (NCS) officers "identified as involved in the hunt" for bin Laden and other CIA officials would go on to meet with Bigelow and Boal, and work on the ZDT script. 
 
 "The [bin Laden] operation team provided the filmmakers background on the intelligence portions of the [bin Laden] raid," the CIA ethics report said. One CIA officer said that she "provided an overview to Boal of the intelligence case [redacted] for the public roll out plan about the Bin Laden raid…. [Redacted] advised that Boal and Bigelow visited CTC offices to get the working condition atmospherics and the personal interactions the team experienced working the [bin Laden] operation. [Redacted] commented that Boal and Bigelow were interested in the human element for the Zero Dark Thirty movie." 
 
 At one point, an officer told the inspector general's investigators that she "covered up classified [sic] on her desk when Boal and Bigelow visited." 
 
 Soon after the filmmakers told the agency that their project would focus on the CIA's finding and killing of bin Laden in 2011, they met and spoke regularly with agency officials at CIA headquarters in Langley, as well as in Washington, DC and Los Angeles. One officer said Boal "needed to talk to Agency officers as part of the project to get a feeling of what it was like to hunt [bin Laden]." 
 
 Related: The CIA Just Admitted That It Spied on the US Senate 
 
 Bigelow and Boal frequently treated CIA personnel to drinks and meals valued at a total of more than $1,000. It was this revelation by a CIA officer who was interviewed by a member of the inspector general's staff on May 16, 2012 that prompted a larger probe involving interviews with six CIA officers to find out if those who worked on ZDT "committed any statutory or regulatory violations by accepting means and gifts" from the filmmakers. 
 
 According to the ethics report, one CIA officer who met with Boal at the Jefferson Hotel in Washington, DC had decided to relocate the meetings from CIA headquarters to Boal's hotel suite in late June 2011 to "minimize the talk and avoid jealousy" in the counterterrorism center. The meetings lasted two to four hours, and the officer recalled that she ordered grilled cheese, French fries, and a soda while they worked. 
 
 "Jealousy in CTC over who was getting 'face time' with the filmmakers led the [Office of Public Affairs] to move some meetings off campus," the report said. 
 
 The officer said the "off campus" meetings were quieter, and that the purpose was to "obtain unclassified information to develop the female actor's character, and talk through issues." She told the inspector general "that the conversation topics she shared with Boal and Bigelow during meetings included how the [bin Laden] operation team got from point A to point B." 
 
 When the pair broke for dinner, they dined either at the hotel restaurant or at the now-closed French restaurant Citronelle. Boal always paid, she told the inspector general. 
 
 While shopping, the officer 'saw something designed by Prada and commented that she liked the designer. Boal said he knew the designer personally and offered her tickets to a Prada fashion show.' 
 
 The officer's first introduction to Bigelow was over the phone in Boal's hotel suite at the Jefferson. At the time, Bigelow was in Tahiti shooting a commercial for Chanel. Later, in July 2011, that officer met Boal and Bigelow at the Ritz-Carlton in Georgetown, and Bigelow gave the officer a pair of "black Tahitian pearl earrings" as a thank-you for helping with the film project. 
 
 During the inspector general's investigation, the officer voluntarily turned over the earrings to the CIA watchdog so that they could be appraised. 
 
 "The jeweler offered his professional opinion that the earrings were not worth a formal appraisal, citing the pearls were painted, not genuine black pearls, and that the posts were not platinum," the inspector general's report said. "The jeweler said the appraisal would cost more than the earrings. The jeweler also said that he estimated the value of the earrings to be 'no more than $200' but 'would ask between $60 and $70 if he were selling the earrings on eBay.'" 
 
 After the non-appraisal, the earrings were returned to the officer. 
 
 That woman, according to a CIA officer in the agency's counterterrorism division who reviewed the documents obtained by VICE News, is one of the people on whom Maya, the main character in ZDT, is based. In the movie, it is Maya's tireless work, along with intelligence obtained from detainees after they've been tortured, that is responsible for revealing the identity of bin Laden's courier, which in turn leads the CIA to bin Laden. 
 
 The officer on whom Maya was reportedly partly based would go on to tell investigators that she had three further in-person "social contacts" with Boal and/or Bigelow without members of the Office of Public Affairs present, having "developed a friendship with [the filmmakers] over time." This included a dinner at the members-only social club Soho House in Los Angeles while the officer was on vacation in August 2011. At the dinner, the officer gave Bigelow a "mini Burka and a publicly available FBI wanted poster of Bin laden that had 'Deceased' written across it." Bigelow offered to arrange a private screening of ZDT at the Soho House for the officer and her family when the movie came out. 
 
 When the officer checked with CIA public affairs, however, she was told not to accept the offer. 
 
 In November 2011, the officer "spent about eight hours shopping and dining" with Boal the day after reviewing the script. While shopping, "she saw something designed by Prada and commented that she liked the designer. Boal said he knew the designer personally and offered her tickets to a Prada fashion show." The officer declined, believing she wouldn't be allowed to accept. 
 
 She was then advised by CIA to cut off contact with Boal. Her last conversation with him was in May 2012, "when she told him she could no longer maintain contact with him." 
 
 "Boal said he understood, but e-mailed her another three clips from the movie set and said that she could send the clips to spam or delete them," the inspector general's ethics report said. 
 
 The CIA officer told the inspector general's staff that Boal tried to get her to sign a release form at one of their meetings. He explained, "that a person who did not like how they were portrayed in the Hurt Locker sued him." (Boal and Bigelow had previously written and directed The Hurt Locker.) The CIA officer, however, did not sign it. 
 
 * * * 
 
 The "Maya" officer wasn't the only CIA employee who met with Bigelow and Boal while on vacation in Los Angeles during production of the movie. One officer who had several meals with the filmmakers in Washington, DC met Boal in Hollywood for a meal, then drove to a beach house in nearby Malibu where he met with Bigelow and "relaxed and conversed." The officer told investigators that he paid for all of his travel costs, and that others at the CIA were aware of his travel plans. He said he stayed in contact with Boal via personal email, but that the correspondence ended in February 2012. 
 
 The officer also told investigators that "in meetings with BoaI, he provided some background on history of the lead, described time periods, field experiences of a typical case officer, impact of the Khost [Afghanistan] attack on [CIA] personnel in terms of morale and following efforts, the strategic view of the hunt for [bin Laden] and ongoing efforts to dismantle AI Q'aida, and the relationship with the US military in general on operations. In regard to meetings where Bigelow was present, [the officer] stated that she seemed most interested in 'what's it like in the field.'" 
 
 The "Khost attack" refers to a 2009 suicide bombing at Camp Chapman in Afghanistan dramatized in ZDT. The attack killed nine people, including a CIA officer named Jennifer Matthews who had worked on the CIA's bin Laden team since the 1990s. Matthews was another one of the CIA officers on whom Maya was based. 
 
 'I was able to find the tequila we discussed online,' the CIA employee wrote. 'It prices at $169.99 (that's the highest I saw for it).' 
 
 The officer admitted he had not reported to the CIA a gift he received from Boal — a bottle of tequila that Boal said "was worth several hundred dollars." According to an email included in the documents obtained by VICE News, someone at CIA attempted to find out how much the tequila was worth. 
 
 "I was able to find the tequila we discussed online," the CIA employee, whose name is redacted, wrote. "It prices at $169.99 (that's the highest I saw for it)." 
 
 Whether or not the officer knew if he was required to report the gift is unclear. He told the inspector general that "neither OPA or Office of General Counsel provided any guidance on what could or could not be discussed, nor guidance of reporting meetings with the filmmakers." Instead, he said, he and other members of the CIA's Counterterrorism Center "developed their own 'red line' topics which they would not discuss or elaborate upon." 
 
 Boal had met with another CIA officer just once for 30 minutes at the Ritz-Carlton hotel in Georgetown. The officer said he gave Boal a copy of the book "Kill Bin Laden that he signed with apologies, since Boal wrote the screenplay based on the book that became invalid once [bin Laden] was killed." 
 
 The book, subtitled "A Delta Force Commander's Account of the Hunt for the World's Most Wanted Man," is described as "the first eyewitness account of the Battle of Tora Bora" and was written by Dalton Fury. 
 
 Boal then offered the CIA officer tickets to the premiere of ZDT, but the officer "did not find the offer genuine." 
 
 A person who appears to be an OPA official told investigators that "the authorization to support the [bin Laden] movie project came from the Director of Central Intelligence suite…. OPA's role in the movie project was to be present at meetings between the film producers and Agency officers…. Boal needed to talk to Agency officers as part of the project, and those officers were not to interact with the film producers without OPA being present." 
 
 Boal had vetted his script with CIA officers and public affairs officials numerous times, both in person and telephonically. The timeline included in the cache of documents said Boal also "reads his script over the telephone" to public affairs officers on October 26, November 1, November 18, and December 5 "so that [public affairs] could determine If the script inadvertently exposed any sensitivities." 
 
 One CIA official told investigators that Boal walked him through the ZDT script "during four or five telephone conversations in September or October 2011." The official, whose name is redacted, "offered that he checked the names in the script to ensure they were not close to true names." 
 
 The official said he and another person whose name is redacted reviewed the script for "egregious errors like having dogs in the interrogation scenes." The officer said that he told Boal this was inaccurate because "CIA would never have dogs in an interrogation room." Boal was also told that a scene that showed "Agency officers partying and shooting guns" was inaccurate because "Agency officers would not do that." Other concerns were raised about detainee debriefing scenes that depicted captives being "punched and kicked." 
 
 At some point, a CIA official "put a stop to CTC officers having further media contact." 
 
 The Office of the Inspector General concluded that all of the CIA officers it interviewed "accepted gifts, to include meals, from Boal and/or Bigelow." However, the inspector general "did not discover any evidence" that the officers "were given any guidance regarding the acceptance of meals and gifts from the filmmakers." One of the CIA officers mailed Boal and Bigelow's production company a $500 check for the meals she was treated to after the inspector general's probe. 
 
 Moreover, the inspector general "did not discover any evidence" that the CIA's Office of Public Affairs "or any other office in the CIA provided clear guidance to any" of the National Clandestine Service officers "who met with the filmmakers about what could or could not be discussed or any rules of conduct regarding those interactions with the exception that [one CIA officer] was eventually told to submit a [statement of compliance form] to report her social contact with the filmmakers, and subsequently, to cease her interactions with the filmmakers." 
 
 The inspector general "also did not discover any evidence that the NCS officers who met with the filmmakers disclosed any classified information" to the filmmakers. 
 
 Still, Bigelow and Boal's interactions with the CIA resulted in a movie whose narrative was disputed by lawmakers, journalists, and intelligence officials who had worked on the film, which earned more than $130 million worldwide. (Zero Dark Thirty lost the 2013 Academy Award for Best Picture to another CIA movie, Argo.) 
 
 Though the movie makes clear as it opens that it is "based on first-hand accounts of actual events," Senator Dianne Feinstein, the chairwoman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, who spearheaded the Senate's investigation into the CIA's torture program while ZDT was in production, wrote an unprecedented letter sent to the head of Sony Pictures, which distributed the film. 
 
 That letter, dated December 19, 2012, the day ZDT was released, said that the movie "is factually inaccurate, and we believe that you have an obligation to state that the role of torture in the hunt for Usama Bin Laden is not based on the facts, but rather part of the film's fictional narrative." 
 
 Michael Morrell, the former acting director of the CIA, who is identified in the inspector general report as having met with Bigelow and Boal to discuss their film, said in a statement disseminated to CIA employees a week after the movie was released that it is "not a realistic portrayal of the facts," but a "dramatization." 
 
 At one time, the Senate Intelligence Committee investigated the CIA's contacts with Bigelow and Boal and whether the CIA was responsible for the film's depiction of torture and its efficacy in getting a courier to give up information that lead to bin Laden's location, but little came of the probe. Peter King, however, has continued to demand a full public accounting from the Obama administration about the disclosures. 
 
 Neither Bigelow nor a spokesperson for Boal responded to VICE News' requests for comment. Both filmmakers have been guarded about their working relationship with the CIA and have chalked up criticism of their film to "politics." In an interview with Empire magazine, Boal said he did not want to discuss his research for fear that it "will come back to haunt me in a Senate hearing, which is a real possibility." 
 
 Related: Meet John Napier Tye, the US Government's Favorite Whistleblower 
 
 Bigelow, in an account published in the Los Angeles Times on January 15, 2013, responded to criticisms about the movie's depiction of torture and the role ZDT suggested it played in leading the CIA to bin Laden. 
 
 "Confusing depiction with endorsement is the first step toward chilling any American artist's ability and right to shine a light on dark deeds, especially when those deeds are cloaked in layers of government secrecy and obfuscation," Bigelow wrote. "On a practical and political level, it does seem illogical to me to make a case against torture by ignoring or denying the role it played in US counter-terrorism policy and practices." 
 
 * * * 
 
 The inspector general identified several potential criminal violations of federal law — Panetta's unauthorized disclosure of classified information to Boal, and a separate federal violation of transmitting or losing of defense information. 
 
 Additionally, the inspector general identified as a potential violation of federal criminal law the bribery of public officials and witnesses by Bigelow and Boal. The cases were referred to the Justice Department for criminal prosecution, but Justice declined to prosecute in favor of "administrative action" by the CIA. 
 
 In a statement provided to VICE News, CIA spokesman Ryan Trapani said the agency did, in fact, take action. In response to the report on potential ethics violations, the CIA's Office of Public Affairs "implemented mandatory annual ethics training for all OPA employees that is tailored to circumstances they may encounter and took administrative actions designed to reinforce ethical duties and reporting requirements. 
 
 "In the wake of 'Zero Dark Thirty,' CIA has completely overhauled its procedures for interaction with the entertainment industry. Among other things, the Agency created a centralized record-keeping system for entertainment industry requests and, in 2012, issued comprehensive, new management guidance on contacts with and support to the entertainment industry." 
 
 The Office of Public Affairs' formal written policy, "Management Guidance on Contact with the Entertainment Industry and Support to Entertainment Industry Projects," was issued in December 2012. VICE News has requested a copy of it under the Freedom of Information Act. 
 
 Trapani continued: 
 
 "OPA also strengthened policies and procedures to ensure the protection of classified information and to safeguard against unauthorized disclosures. In connection with the March 2014 [inspector general's] report [about Panetta], OPA expanded its staff to include an Information Management Officer responsible for classification review of speeches and other material released to the public. OPA also created new procedures and policies for vetting speeches and for ensuring that all OPA-related visitors to the CIA compound are appropriately coordinated with security personnel." 
 
 Mark Zaid, a Washington, DC-based attorney who has represented intelligence community employees in cases involving the leaking of classified information, told VICE News that the circumstances surrounding Panetta's "apparent inadvertent disclosure of classified information to a Hollywood film producer was a comedy of errors and failure of coordination within CIA." 
 
 "At worst, perhaps administrative discipline should be meted out to several officials and notations placed within their security files, but frankly, any harm that occurred appears to be virtually non-existent," Zaid said. "The real lesson to be learned from this episode is that CIA does what it wants with classified information if it serves its interests and punishes only those who run afoul of its policies or management." 
 
 Follow Jason Leopold (@JasonLeopold) and Ky Henderson (@kyhenderson) on Twitter. 
 
 UPDATE: A comment from CIA spokesman Ryan Trapani was added to this story.
– Kathryn Bigelow's Detroit tells the story of a black singer who takes refuge in a dingy motel to escape the 1967 Motor City riots. Based on real events, the film reunites Bigelow with screenwriter Mark Boal, both of the Oscar-winning film The Hurt Locker. It's got a strong 89% "fresh" rating at Rotten Tomatoes. Here's what critics are saying: "Bigelow drills down into one of American history's most egregious cases of abuse of police power, bringing it to life with visceral detail and slowed-down meticulousness" in what "feels like her timeliest movie yet," writes Ann Hornaday at the Washington Post. It's "daring, sophisticated and unforgettably disturbing." And "in scale, scope and the space it offers for a long-awaited moral reckoning, it's nothing less than monumental." "It's hard to overstate just how visceral and harrowing an experience it is," writes Lindsey Bahr at the AP, calling Detroit "a well-made and evocative film" jam-packed with "stomach-churning horror." She argues there could be more nuance and perspective. But "maybe anger is all you're supposed to feel when you step outside the theater. Maybe not feeling satisfied with Detroit is the point." Chris Klimek says Detroit is "maddeningly imperfect but still honorable," citing "lightly fictionalized" aspects of the otherwise true story that set it up "for maximum outrage." This is "messy work, even when it’s done in good faith," he writes at NPR. He applauds John Boyega, previously of The Force Awakens. Radiating a "Denzel-like calm," he shows "he's a bonafide movie star," Klimek writes. Peter Howell's main gripe is that the film "tries to tell us everything about the circumstances without telling us much about the people." But Detroit still makes for "urgent viewing," he writes at the Toronto Star. Why? "The injustice and anger behind it all feels like current reality, even a half-century on," when "a person's skin can still determine everything from employment opportunities to treatment by police."