reviews

How do you solve a problem like America? Where do you even start? Everything — the war, the demagoguery, the blanket repeal of civil liberties, the whole big mess — seems so entrenched and so intertwined that it’s paralyzing. I’m so hopeless these days that things will ever get better, to the point where I’m not sure I can take yet more rehashing of the fiasco.

British filmmaker Tony Kaye, who made the jolting racism drama *American History X,* once against turns an outsider’s eye on a peculiarly American neurosis: the controversy over abortion.

The tragedy still unfolding in the Sudanese region of Darfur has been officially designated a genocide, but global action to stop it has been limited. This powerful film, from documentarian Theodore Braun, aims to raise awareness of the situation and motivate all of us to do something about it.

If your idea of comedy gold is really terrible, awful groaners of puns, look to ‘Bee Movie,’ which can’t get enough of every obvious and unfunny play on insect words imaginable.

It all sounds hopelessly sentimental, yet none of it plays out that way in *Martian Child,* for all that the potential for drowning the audience in melodrama was there.

Remember how oh-my-god cool it was to hear, all those years back, that Michael Mann, with his movie ‘Heat,’ was gonna get Al Pacino and Robert De Niro together onscreen for the first time? And then they were hardly together at all except for that one scene, but it turned out to be okay because that one scene was incredible?

This is a tough one to talk about. On the one hand, it’s failure, maybe even a disaster. On the other hand, it’s so fascinating a failure that it’s worth seeing…