Some of us have been following writer-director Noah Baumbach's career since his 1995 debut (the addictively quotable, post-collegiate pearl "Kicking and Screaming"), but his wry, semi-autobiographical dramedy "The Squid and the Whale" had even bigger acclaim and success spilling out its blowhole in 2005.
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Is a director's primary responsibility to her audience or her subject? Kasi Lemmons, the director of the new biopic "Talk to Me," gets caught between those two poles. People get up in arms when a fictionalized version of real events takes liberties with what actually happened. A film like this puts it in perspective. Had it been a little less accurate, it might have been a much better story. But, then, it wouldn't be truthful.

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If Dieter Dengler didn't exist, Werner Herzog would have had to invent him. As it is, he has reinvented him, in a way, in his new film "Rescue Dawn." Dengler was a German-American who dreamed of becoming a pilot ever since the day Allied aircraft buzzed his home and destroyed the little village in which he grew up. He emigrated to the US and joined the Navy just in time to serve in the Vietnam War. On his very first mission into Asia, he was shot down, captured and imprisoned in a Laotian P.O.W. camp.
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"Crazy Love" could only work as a documentary. If you tried to pass off this story, about a man and a woman who marry years after he blinded her by dousing her with acid, as an invention, no one would believe it. And yet here it is, complete with old photographs, newsreels and articles ("Acid Thrower Blinds Girl" screams a typical headline). They say it takes all kinds. Well, some of those kinds are severely deranged.

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