A withdrawn young woman, recently released from a psychiatric ward, takes a job in a small law firm where she develops a kinky relationship with her new boss.

The year’s least politically correct movie, Secretary is bound to raise a few hackles in a country like the United States, where we are so unaccountably terrified of sex in all of its manifestations. Never mind power, or speaking of sex and power together. Although there hasn’t been a good, honest portrayal of heterosexuality in an American film since The Last Picture Show (1971) — well, okay, maybe since Jane Fonda’s Oscar-winning, shocked orgasm in Coming Home (1979) –we are constantly being told that movie screens are overflowing with gratuitous “sex.” The truth is, any sex that does turn up at the Cineplex is either adolescent titillation, or the occasional post-coital pan over heaps of clothing strewn across a floor to find the couple talking dreamily in each other’s arms, covered up to the neck. (more…)

Relentless, amiable provocateur Michael Moore is commonly called a documentary filmmaker, but his films are really the cinematic equivalent of the personal essay. Agreeably confrontational, filled with Moore’s own assumptions and observations about the world around him, his movies are stream-of-consciousness ruminations on various aspects of what it means to be a thinking American, encouraging laughter at corporate hubris and man-on-the-street ignorance, while nudging viewers toward a sympathetic awareness of the forgotten and downtrodden in the richest country the world has ever known. Subtlety is not his forte, but neither is it the province of his subjects; he often uses sledgehammer tactics, ambushing unwitting targets to force his own dramatic moments, but because he attacks the privileged classes exclusively, he gets away with it. And he should: too many of our debates are being defined and controlled by the privileged, now that a handful of corporations own every media outlet in the country.

With Bowling for Columbine, Moore has raised the level of his own private cinema, making a sincere, feature length examination of gun violence in America, using the April 1999 massacre at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado as a springboard. But the film is not about Columbine, per se; it is an investigation of the culture surrounding the event, Moore asking questions, not only of clueless dinosaurs like Charlton Heston, eminently protected in their guarded estates, but of himself as well, undertaking a quest to discover just what the hell it is that makes a country with everything so recklessly belligerent toward the world, and ultimately its own people. For once, Moore doesn’t let his urge to entertain eclipse his filmmaking instincts: Bowling for Columbine is often hilarious, but it uses laughter as an anesthetic for the painful truths in its frightening real-life images. (more…)