100 Words on…. The Power of Nightmares

This is a rare chance to see a powerful film that never aired on American TV or had a standard theatrical run since its BBC debut in 2004. Adam Curtis’s occasionally deadpan, always dead-serious documentary traces the parallel rise of radical Islamists in the Middle East and neoconservative ideologues in the U.S., making the case that each group gained power by fomenting fear of the other to create global mayhem.

100 Words on... The Servant

A glittery-eyed Dirk Bogarde morphs from abject subservience to contemptuous control while James Fox slowly deflates from the unearned confidence of blind privilege to sodden impotence in this intelligent adaptation of a novel about the triumph of an English manservant over his employer. Is this a parable about the collapse of the British ruling class or just a high-class game of cat and mouse—kind of a less gimmicky Sleuth?