Good timing, Bhutto! You've decided to release yourself—a documentary about uprisings, politics, bloodshed, and the first woman elected to lead a Muslim country—precisely when the news is swirling with stories about uprisings and politics and bloodshed across the Muslim world. Precisely when legions of curious but not-terribly-informed Americans are vaguely hoping for some kind of crash course on uprisings and politics and bloodshed in the Muslim world. And just as a Pakistani court has issued a warrant for the arrest of former president General Pervez Musharraf for playing a role in the assassination of Benazir Bhutto—your movie's subject! You're pretty lucky, Bhutto.

Musharraf, by the way, is currently living in London—the Pakistani court has asked England to extradite him, so that is its own diplomatic battle. Meanwhile, Musharraf has hinted that he will run for president again, which is ballsy. How does a guy run a military government for nearly 10 years, get ousted, flee, and attempt a political comeback in a country where he's wanted for abetting the murder of one of the country's most popular politicians and...

Excuse me. I'm getting ahead of myself.

Bhutto is being released at precisely the right moment, but it stands on its own—without the support of world-historical events—as a marvelously slick, energetic, and informative documentary about the Bhutto family, liberal types who hoped they could push the young nation of Pakistan toward something better than oppressive theocracy or military dictatorship. For their pains, they were adored and elected, then arrested, murdered, poisoned, hanged, and blown up. "The whole story of the Bhuttos has strong elements of a Greek tragedy," says Pakistani writer and thinker Tariq Ali. And he is entirely correct: Bhutto is a particular history, but it is a personal-political story with elements of strong universality, like Shakespeare's Julius Caesar and Mario Vargas Llosa's The Feast of the Goat. And like those two stories, Bhutto is soaked in blood.

Benazir Bhutto was born in Pakistan, was reared at her president-father's side before he was arrested and hanged, studied at Harvard and Oxford, and returned to Pakistan to found a party and lead a crusade against a military dictator. There, she was arrested and imprisoned for political reasons in a cell you don't want to imagine: "The summer heat turned my cell into an oven. My skin split and peeled, coming off my hands in sheets. Boils erupted on my face. My hair, which had always been thick, began to come out by the handful. Insects crept into the cell like invading armies."

But Bhutto's biggest strength is its moral ambiguity. It makes its subject out to be a hero and a martyr, but not a saint. Undoubtedly, Benazir Bhutto was strong and brave and fought so Pakistan could have a government-other-than-oppressive-theocracy-or-military-dictatorship. But Ali's quote reveals more than just tragedy—it reveals a level of hubris that plagued the family. Was Bhutto guilty of a little corruption here and there? Did she spill some nuclear secrets to North Korea? Did she marry a feckless, reckless playboy just because getting elected as the female president of Pakistan was hard enough, not to mention being the single female president of Pakistan? Bhutto does not answer these questions. But it raises them, then quickly dispenses with them to wonder about the more serious question—was Musharraf involved in a conspiracy to kill his political rival Benazir Bhutto?

The film does not, and cannot, answer that question, either. We'll read about that one in the newspapers.