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The Thanks of a Grateful Nation: Days of Glory

If you get a particularly insistent sense of déjà vu while watching this World War II drama from France, it may be because you’ve read George Packer’s damning article in last week’s New Yorker about the treatment of Iraqis who work for the American forces in their home country. Not only are their services, beginning with a knowledge of the language and mores of the region, undervalued and underutilized; Packer writes that they are offered little or no protection from sectarian assassins, and have almost no hope of being allowed to emigrate to the US when we leave. In a few years they will almost inevitably find themselves in much worse circumstances than they would have been had they not offered to work for us.



A Prairie Brainstorm: The Lookout

You could call The Lookout just a bank-heist movie but you’d be selling it short. It’s got a bank job, to be sure, and it’s an increasingly tensile, eventually gripping little movie. But what makes it worth your time is the way that writer-director Scott Frank works his way toward the tense, frisson-punctuated moments, and to the crime-procedural scenes, in an involving but measured and unusual fashion.





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