Recently released on Blu-ray and DVD: The Insult, Finding Oscar, Going Clear: Scientology and the Prison of Belief, Special Delivery.
The Insult
Lebanon’s civil war ended years ago, but Lebanese society never entirely recovered. In Ziad Doueiri’s The Insult (2017), a Lebanese Catholic and a Palestinian Muslim clash over a Beirut storm gutter and their hostility turns into a courtroom drama and renewed street violence. The resentment toward the alleged privileges of minorities rings familiar in America, but the complexities of Mideast politics are at issue here. The message is that no one has a monopoly on suffering.
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Finding Oscar
Steven Spielberg came onboard as executive producer of this documentary on the scars left by one of Central America’s civil wars of the ’80s. At that time, communist guerillas were pitted against the U.S.-supported Guatemalan military, whose special forces razed hundreds of villages and murdered many thousands of villagers, filling mass graves with their bodies. Finding Oscar focuses on the search for a survivor, a boy named Oscar, and the effort to finally expose the truth.
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Going Clear: Scientology and the Prison of Belief
The triple Emmy-winning documentary is composed largely of leaders in the Church of Scientology who defected from the organization in recent years. They tell a horror story resembling Stalin’s Soviet Union: personality cults, forced labor, brutal interrogation, intimidation, surveillance and a paranoid mindset that divides the world into friends and foes. Director Alex Gibney calls out Scientology as a rapacious business, profiting from its nonprofit status, with a sci-fi cosmology scripted by founder L. Ron Hubbard.
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Special Delivery
Bank heist movies were big in the era of Special Delivery (1976). The movie even makes a political wisecrack about banks that finance violence across the world (Patti Hearst’s celebrated bank job was on everyone’s mind). Special Delivery’s signature scene was its escape up the sheer sides of L.A. skyscrapers. Bo Svenson leads the gang and Cybil Shepherd emerges as his love interest, but the best moments come from a cast of streetwise-looking character actors.
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