A new film by Ridley Scott is always an occasion. No other filmmaker has his sense of creating an immersive historical document. “;American Gangster,”; set in 1970s New York, felt just as corporeal as “;Kingdom of Heaven,”; his Crusader saga set in the Dark Ages.

And so, here's “;Body of Lies,”; which is set—right now.

The conflict in the Middle East has been going on a thousand years, and maybe a thousand more, and “;Lies”; is based upon a best-selling novel by Washington Post columnist David Ignatius. It's your basic CIA-action potboiler, with multiple double-crosses, riddles within conundrums, baking sun, barking mangy dogs and sweating, hairy men with trigger tempers who are well-armed. That's all a given with this genre, which is designed to make one despair about intelligent, peaceful solutions in the Mideast. Everyone's guilty, primarily of deliberate, self-imposed intolerance—on all sides.

What makes this work sing is Scott's fascinating use of time, or rather, the lack of it. Today's conflict in the Middle East is characterized by instant communication. CIA “;handlers”; in Washington are in continuous contact with field operatives, and everything is played in real time via the Internet, satellite surveillance and unmanned aerial vehicles.

Russell Crowe plays a pudgy D.C. spy bureaucrat who dogs his highly trained man in the field, played by Leonardo DiCaprio in a panhandler beard. Because of the time difference, neither can exactly work a 9-to-5 shift. It's a 24-hour-a-day job—which leaves no time for reflection or deliberation. Patience is no longer a virtue in a results-now information cycle, and as you can imagine, this impasse is the central conflict of the film.

Some time ago, American intelligence operatives dumped local contacts in favor of electronic surveillance. They figured it was better to have an eye in the sky than a guy in the field. We paid for that on Sept. 11, 2001. What happens when the enemy stops using cell phones, because they know we're listening in?

Recent revelations that the success of the Iraq “;surge”; might be largely attributable to stepped-up CIA “;wet”; operations against insurgent leaders make “;Body of Lies”; even more relevant. Even if this isn't the top of his game, Ridley Scott has made a movie that's uncomfortably current.