Ten days have gone by like a flash and I'm sitting here in the press room on Saturday afternoon, Valentine's Day, mulling over the dull flicks I slept through, the one or two that kept me awake, and the handful that I really wanted to see but never got around to. ("John Rabe", Sean Penn's "Milk", a Persian film called "Barbareye Elly", the latest Wajda, and a few others). Of the half dozen competition films I did get to, not one was a real winner, and most were so...

Directed in tandem by Bill Gutenburg and Dan Sturman, "NANKING" (USA 2007, RT, 91 minutes, in Mandarin, English and Japanese) is a startling and shocking reconstruction of a gigantic atrocity perpetrated by the Japanese army in China nearly 70 years ago, but presented in part by leading actors as if it were taking place today. The result, graphically depicting the sack and destruction of the city along with the indiscriminate bestial massacre of just about the entire civilian population, is a p...