The direct-to-video Unthinkable from a few weeks ago is actually rather good, with equally solid work from Samuel L. Jackson, Michael Sheen, and Carrie-Anne Moss. Moss and her FBI team (which includes Brandon Routh and Gil Bellows) accidentally raid the home of CIA operative "H" (Jackson), who is a specialist in "advanced interrogation techniques".
Sheen is an American soldier who converted to Islam, went rogue, and has set nuclear bombs to explode in major cities. The raid and the arrest of Sheen's character occur almost simultaneously, and Moss' Agent Brody is brought into the interrogation/information extraction process that follows. Most of the movie takes place in a sealed room, where Jackson's escalating "techniques" plunge straight into the heart of questioning what place morality holds in the face of survival. Stephen Root is absolutely stellar as a CIA operative who serves as the handler for Jackson's "H".
I can understand the interpretation of the movie questioning the righteousness of torturing the wicked. I think the movie is really much more about questioning the validity of righteousness rather than bare survival. In that way, Unthinkable is more about the illusions the human race has of being different from other animals. The potential interpretation of "are the terrorists right?" is a big chunk of why this movie never saw proper theatrical release. The other part is that the theatrical market is afraid of "people locked in a room" dramas, and has been for some time.
Director Gregor Jordan made the Heath Ledger-starring Ned Kelly, one of the most under-seen and under-appreciated dramas of the aughts. He also directed the emotionally dead The Informers (a fault of the material, not the direction), and the screwed-after-9/11 Buffalo Soldiers, which everyone seems to have forgotten about. As a quick aside, it dealt with American soldiers being shady just before the fall of the Berlin Wall, but it did not fit in with the decidedly "Hell Yeah, America" atmosphere due to portraying American soldiers as anything but saints.
I listened to the commentary track from Jordan, and the most interesting points he dropped were about working cooperatively with the U.S. government so that certain things were portrayed as realistically as possible. I scanned the "Director's Cut", and only found it to add some voice-over on top of the end credits. I found it unnecessary, as I'm assuming the studio did. While Blockbuster Video stores still exist, movies like this will still end up getting seen by tons more people than would have seen them in theatres. Once those stores die though, it remains to be seen how studios will adapt to selling this product in the VOD world.