The TRC, of course, is the commission set in place under the guidance of Bishop Desmond Tutu to offer amnesty to South Africans who confess to crimes — beatings, rapes, arson, and murder — committed under the apartheid regime. Tutu’s reasoning is brilliant: if people are to live together with civility and respect after such injustice and trauma, they must first confess and forgive — tell the truth and reconcile. In Long Night’s Journey we get a sense both of the difficulty of this process and of the tremendous moral healing and cleansing that can result from it, so that however harrowing it may be the film is also tremendously hopeful. Has any other nation ever responded to a violent, hate-filled past with such clarity? You’ll have your favorite villains, and your heroes, as we did. But if you can keep from weeping, you’re made of stern stuff indeed.

It may be senility on our part, but we loved Rod Lurie’s The Contender for its feminist politics. Don’t show us wish-fulfilment love stories or action movies where the right always wins, just let us wallow in the make-believe of civic justice. The notion that one could be governed by people who are moral, intelligent, and clever is irresistible; it’s why we settle down in front of The West Wing every Wednesday. That series and this film may be the beginning of a new genre of Utopian fantasy which coincides neatly with the times and places of our everyday world. But must it be fantastic? We’ve just pointed to the real thing in South Africa.

When the president (Jeff Bridges) tries to appoint the first woman vice-president (Joan Allen), a troglodytic senator (Gary Oldman) feels it his god-given duty to hit her with every piece of dirt his staff can vacuum out of her past. Bridges and Oldman are excellent; Joan Allen, whom we have long admired, should be awarded a special Oscar next week. The relationship between Bridges and the White House chef is alone worth the price of admission.

If Neil LaBute’s earlier films were like the rat tart in a Monty Python sketch, Nurse Betty is one without so much rat in it. It’s not a nursery tale, though; he’s heavily influenced here by the crime comedy of Quentin Tarantino, not least in the character of a philosophical gangster, played by Morgan Freeman. The insanely complex plot involves amnesia, delusions, and a slack-jawed fascination with soap opera, but Renée Zellweger, Chris Rock, Greg Kinnear, and the incandescent Alison Janney make Nurse Betty an enjoyable way to spend two hours.

We also liked Best in Show, another Christopher Guest send-up in the tradition of Waiting for Guffman and This Is Spinal Tap. Dog shows are as easy a target for lampoon as community theaters and rock bands, and Best features excellent performances by Michael McKean, Catherine O’Hara, John Michael Higgins, and Jane Lynch, not to mention more good-looking dogs than we’ve ever seen.

Two-Family House is a puzzler, a modest independent feature that has such a weird script, it must be someone’s life story. On Staten Island, ten years after he’s discharged from the Army, an Italian American dreamer (played by Michael Rispoli) buys a dilapidated duplex. Against the advice of his wife (Kathrine Narducci) and her parents, he intends to turn the ground floor into a tavern. Upstairs live a feckless Irish couple, the man (Kevin Conway) a drunk and the woman (Kelly MacDonald) pregnant at term. When she has a mixed-race baby her drunken husband staggers off, and the rest of the film is a hesitant, minutely detailed journey toward self-knowledge on the part of the would-be tavern keeper.

House has virtues, chiefly its excellent cast and a vivid sense of the 1950s (trust us on this), and it’s refreshing to see a story about Italian Americans that has no gang presence at all. A slight film, but it would make good video viewing.

Also slight — barely there, in fact — is The Opportunists, a tiny crime drama written and directed by Myles Connell, about an aging safecracker turned auto mechanic (beautifully played by Christopher Walken) who tries to go straight. Connell had funding from Sundance and somehow secured an excellent cast, including Walken, Cyndi Lauper, Tom Noonan, Anne Pitoniak, Kate Burton, and Donal Logue, as well as a young Irish actor named Peter McDonald who brings the anxiety and secretiveness of Derry into the looser streets of New York with his furrowed brow, bow-legged lope, and sullen, barely understandable Ulster whine.

Set in a lower-middle-class neighborhood in Queens, where security guards coach Little League ball and buy off the cops with stolen VCRs, the plot is one of those self-canceling loops of mild corruption that looks a lot like life. We’d have enjoyed The Opportunists more if all the cast members hadn’t been suffering from unmedicated moderate depression, but it’s an auspicious debut feature.

Our least favorite film last month was the most hyped, No. 1 in the U.S. as we write: the Jerry Stiller-Robert DeNiro farce Meet the Parents. Instead of freshening up a plot that was old in Molière’s day — heavy father meets brash young suitor — the four credited writers and director Jay Roach rely on Stiller’s charming-liar shtick and DeNiro’s scary-dude routine, wasting the talents of their female actors: the delightful Teri Polo as the sweetheart and daughter, Blythe Danner as Mom, and Nicole DeHuff as Polo’s sister. The lame conception is stretched so thin we found the film a drag.

The fourth annual Minneapolis/St. Paul Jewish Film Festival opens Nov. 11 at Bell Museum, with a fact-based fiction film called Kippur, about the 1973 Yom Kippur Waron the Golan Heights between Israel and Syria. It’s difficult for us to recommend a festival of mainly Israeli films while that country is once again waging terrorist attacks against an unarmed Palestinian population; however, Kippur succeeds in giving a strong sense of the chaotic absurdity of war, its tedium punctuated only by agony and death. Other festival offerings include a diverse group of films, from the six-hour epic Fragments: Jerusalem to September Song: The Music of Kurt Weill.

Penumbra Theater’s production of the cumbersomely titled Trial of One Short-Sighted Black Woman vs. Mammy Louise and Safreeta Mae plays through Nov. 12, and we recommend that you see it. Playwright Marcia Leslie uses the inherently dramatic form of a courtroom confrontation between Victoria, a successful African American executive, played by Austene Van Williams-Clark, and two stereotypes of black womanhood that she blames for holding her and others like her back from the achievements to which their brains and talents should impel them. These stereotypes are the obedient, nurturing Mammy Louise (Edna D. Duncan) and the biracial wanton temptress Safreeta Mae (Rachel Leslie); Victoria’s case is brought by a prosecuting attorney (Marie-Françoise Theodore) and the two accused are defended by their own lawyer (Regina Marie Williams).

Argument and counter-argument flash across the stage and witnesses are called, ranging from a white film executive and his black assistant to a plantation owner and his wife, all played with virtuosic skill by Lester Purry. We were most struck by playwright Leslie’s vigor and courage: The Trial raises questions that we’ve never heard articulated before on the stage, primarily the question of the survival tactics needed by African American women during slavery, and the extent to which their seeming complicity in such a ghastly system continues to affect their descendants like Victoria. Leslie’s language crackles and her characters are vividly drawn. The direction, by Negro Ensemble Company veteran Paul Carter Harrison, seems to us to detract from the drama, but the actors rise above the awkward blocking to give us an unforgettable evening. This is real theater of ideas, as well as a brilliant display of skill.

Performance artist Djola Branner is maturing as a playwright. His House That Crack Built, playing at Pillsbury House Theater through Nov. 18, uses the device of the unmanageable production to very good effect: Every time the people onstage seem to get their act together to sing, dance, or tell a story, one of them interrupts and chaos reigns for a while, and then the elements of performance come together again in a new combination; it’s an appropriate technique for dramatizing the disruptive power of addictive drugs.

Heidi Hunter Batz directs an excellent ensemble of musicians, singers, dancers and actors — some of the performers combine all four roles — to tell a necessarily disjointed story about crack cocaine, its lure, its danger, the injustice of laws concerning it and the way it penetrates all strata of society from homeless junkies living under a bridge to artists and intellectuals.
Antu Yacob has a brilliant opening monologue as the Girl from the Ghetto, pregnant, unable to leave her abusive partner, and hooked on the brief, illusory freedom and pleasure of the crack pipe. Shawn Hamilton, a marvelous dancer, makes the Poet into a complicated and intriguing character, though we wish he grabbed his crotch a tad less; Gavin Lawrence, last seen on local stages as Omari Shakir, is a convincing PhD addict; and Milagros Llauger and Marty Winkler sing like angels, against the driving rhythms of Allen Baker and Kevin Washington.
Here’s an idea: If we made a film about the MnDOT experiment with unmetered ramp entrances, could we call it Forever Amber?