‘This is a true story.” The presence of this disclaimer (or a reasonable variation thereof) at the outset of a picture suggests a license to speak truth to power. But a corking yarn without a storyteller to spin it is a recipe for a flat soufflé. On paper, The Mauritanian has both the story and the teller, yet it never rises to the occasion, despite its best efforts. Mohamedou Ould Slahi (Tahar Rahim), a titular sub-Saharan native, returning home for a family wedding. A police escort arrives, and in no time, the guest of honor is a few steps away from taking a perp walk to Guantanamo Bay as Mauritania’s most wanted, framed as Al Qaeda’s head recruiter and one of the organizers of 9/11. Enter Nancy Hollander (Jodie Foster), a civil rights defender looking to “pick a pro-bono fight,” who positions herself squarely in Slahi’s corner. Whether or not he is guilty of the charges is irrelevant to Hollander; her job is to prove whether the U.S. government has sufficient evidence to warrant a stay in the Bay. As good as Foster is, she gives her co-players little in the way of spontaneous behavior off of which to bounce. With his experience working in both documentary realism (One Day in September, Touching the Void) and confined space (the gripping submarine thriller Black Sea), Kevin Macdonald seemed the perfect director to act as our guide. His documentarian’s eye guides us through the film’s intricate, flashback-within-flashback structure without breaking a sweat, but too often, screenwriters Michael Bronner, Rory Haines, and Sohrab Noshirvani’s nesting doll structure comes up hollow. There is one uniquely horrifying form of torture to which the film introduces audiences: forget waterboarding or the non-stop blare of death metal; here, guards in the market for sadistic kicks visit the prison library and relieve novels of their closing chapters. With: Shailene Woodley and Benedict Cumberbatch. (2021) — Scott Marks