True stories provide fertile breeding ground for awards-season contenders, but few biographies are as rich and strange as that of Mohamedou Ould Salahi, who spent 14 years in Guantanamo Bay on flimsy terrorism charges as the U.S. fought an often-directionless war on terror. The story of how he came to be tracked and renditioned is extraordinary enough, but Kevin Macdonald’s drama The Mauritanian focuses instead on Salahi’s fight for release, starring Tahar Rahim as Salahi, Jodie Foster as his defense attorney Nancy Hollander, and Shailene Woodley as her aide Teri Duncan.
