Bitter Lake is a milestone film by Adam Curtis, the master ransacker of the BBC’s rich archive. Curtis is chasing after an elusive, fresh take on Afghanistan’s oft-reported, little-understood place in modern history. Manically kneading, pounding, and stretching the form, he has created an amalgam of experimental, archival, and essay film. In Curtis’s deft seesawing between the absurd and horrific, we see an experienced hand at the top of his game. Bombshell scenes such as one Marine’s confession and a tense presidential motorcade intermingle artfully with the casually discarded ephemera of the everyday. Somehow, by the end of the film, it’s no hype to say that the 70-year-old shadow of Franklin Roosevelt’s meeting with Ibn Saud at Bitter Lake hangs over all of us. Here is an enormous, and unlikely, accomplishment. (PS) Presented by Restoration Eyecare.