Black Hawk Down (2001)

Costa-Gavras — with the help of Rolf Hochhuth — delivers a stinging indictment of the Catholic church’s part in the Holocaust. You were expecting, maybe, exoneration?

Hollywood, as usual, tells us the truth we want to believe, but here at least there is some credit to us in wanting to believe it.

At one point in Proof of Life, directed by Taylor Hackford, Alice Bowman (Meg Ryan) — who, by the way, is the second movie heroine in a month to share my name — asks Terry Thorne (Russell Crowe), the hot-shot K & R (Kidnap and Ransom) specialist negotiating for the release of her kidnapped husband,…

. . . And now Lewis Schwarzberg raises the question: does being a patriot require you to be a sentimentalist as well?

What a lot of trouble and expense David Mamet goes to just to tell a few
jokes.

A fitfully engaging thriller, as such things go these days, which falls apart in the last ten minutes