The former ABC anchor and current "BBC World News America" contributor expressed his displeasure with the current state of cable news in an editorial that will appear in Sunday's Washington Post.

"We live now in a cable news universe that celebrates the opinions of Olbermann, Rachel Maddow, Chris Matthews, Glenn Beck, Sean Hannity and Bill O'Reilly - individuals who hold up the twin pillars of political partisanship and who are encouraged to do so by their parent organizations because their brand of analysis and commentary is highly profitable," wrote Koppel.

Koppel thinks the domination of partisan punditry has led to "a pervasive ethos that eschews facts in favor of an idealized reality." According to Koppel, Fox and MSNBC "show us the world not as it is, but as partisans (and loyal viewers) at either end of the political spectrum would like it to be." All this politicized news coverage is very upsetting to Koppel. 

"The commercial success of both Fox News and MSNBC is a source of nonpartisan sadness for me," he wrote.

Koppel believes the shift from the more objective style of traditional network news broadcasts to cable's more opinionated coverage is especially dangerous because, "the need for clear, objective reporting in a world of rising religious fundamentalism, economic interdependence and global ecological problems is probably greater than it has ever been." With the modern media's focus on reaching targeted segments of the audience, Koppel doesn't expect to things to improve any time soon.

"There is, after all, not much of a chance that 21st-century journalism will be adapted to conform with the old rules," Koppel wrote.

Koppel isn't the only prominent media figure who criticized cable news this week. Jon Stewart broke down his problems with the 24-hour news networks on Thursday's episode of "The Rachel Maddow Show." 

The late Mr. Koppel was one of four children and lived in Queens with his girlfriend and daughter. The Post has the story.

"Our programs are stronger today than they were ten years ago," wrote Mr. Westin.

Ten years ago, Peter Jennings was still the anchor of World News. Ted Koppel was still at the helm at Nightline. And broadcast TV was still largely unchallenged by cable news and the Internet.

Are the ratings for ABC News programs actually better in 2010 than in 2000?

We took a look.

After some digging, we came up with season averages (October 1999 to September 2000) from ten years ago based on Nielsen data for each of the major shows on ABC News. So based on the 25-54 year old demographic on which news divisions sell ads is ABC News, in fact, doing better than a decade ago?

The short answer: no.

Here's a snapshot of the relevant data based on comparisons with the most recent available weekly averages in the 25-54 demo:

World News, season average 1999-2000: 3,450,000
World News, average, week of 2/15/10: 2,270,000
Down 34.3 percent

Good Morning America, season average 1999-2000: 1,990,000
Good Morning America, average, week of 2/08/10: 2,120,000
Up 6.5 percent

Nightline, season average 1999-2000: 2,250,000
Nightline, average, week of 2/08/10: 1,890,000
Down 16.0 percent

This Week, season average 1999-2000: 1,020,000
This Week, average, week of 2/08/10: 797,000
Down 21.9 percent

And so, here comes Ted Koppel. Maybe.

Politico reports that Mr. Koppel--who friends say would prefer to be secretary of state--is in talks with ABC News President David Westin about taking over for George Stephanopoulos on This Week.

It makes sense. Mr. Koppel isn't doing much these days, and Mr. Westin likes a big name. And it's not mutually exclusive with one of ABC's other reporters--cough, Jake Tapper, Terry Moran--eventually taking over. After all, NBC used Tom Brokaw for a spell in the wake of Tim Russert's death.

Of course, it may not be happening at all. As Steve Krakauer at Mediaite notes, the story's already changed several times. And a response like this, from Mr. Westin, doesn't inspire tremendous confidence:

I will pull back the veil to the limited degree of telling you - for the benefit of your readers - that just about every specific that you have is false.

The move has since touched off speculation that Mr. Koppel made the move in order to become the next moderator of NBC News' Meet the Press.

Mr. Koppel's name has long been a part of the rumors concerning who NBC Universal chief Jeff Zucker might tap for the coveted position.

Then again, in July, Mr. Koppel seemed to dismiss the possibility of taking over the show in an interview with Gail Shister at Mediabistro's TV Newser, suggesting that NBC News needed to hire someone younger.

So much for that.

Today, TV Newser has an interview with Mr. Koppel in which the veteran newsman more or less shoots down that possibility.

"That's the kind of thing that doesn't make a whole lot of sense to me," Mr. Koppel told a Russertian-sounding Gail Shister. "They need to find somebody younger than Tim, not older than Tim. He was 58. I'm 68. I just don't think it's realistic.

"If I were to do something like that, it could only be for a relatively short period," he added. "I don't think that would suit either NBC or me."

In the meantime, Mr. Koppel is keeping busy. In addition to gigs for the Discovery Channel and NPR, it was announced yesterday that Mr. Koppel will be joining BBC America as a contributing analyst.

Pace University's three-day "Aftershock" conference ("Rethinking the Future Since Sept. 11") will have closed its curtains by the weekend.

Katie Couric weighs in tonight with an assessment of national security while Ted Koppel will dig in Sunday.

The two photo exhibits downtown will stick around for a while, but if you want to see a set of memorial quilts, you better get there Friday.

It's obvious why presenters would want to start early, but we have to wonder, how long can Americans remain in this commemorative state?

Oliver Stone's "World Trade Center" (starring Nicolas Cage, above) premiered three weeks ago on 2,957 screens. It has already closed on 55 of them.

-Matthew Schuerman

“He’s an institution,” said one. “He’s a matchmaker!” said another. And: “He’s insane!”

“I swore I wouldn’t speak to you tonight,” Mr. Gerovitz told me, with his characteristic acidity. He dressed natty-casual in a blazer and jeans, his delicate-framed glasses perched atop his head—Mr. Gerovitz has one of those blank-slate poker faces instantly transformed by a grin. The broker implied that the evening was supposed to be about pleasure, not business. Allan M. Gerovitz—the Man Who Owns Cobble Hill and Carroll Gardens, some say—was trying to throw himself a party.

Most New Yorkers regard real-estate brokers as gutter scum; Brooklynites revere Mr. Gerovitz with a bizarre, often fearful obsessiveness. For over 20 years, Mr. Gerovitz has been the one-man co-op board for a string of random, pretty and pricy floor-throughs that have one big thing in common: They’re all inhabited by people deemed “good” by Mr. Gerovitz in buildings owned by landlords deemed “good” by him, too.

A neighborhood of Good People! Even with so many lawyers, so many media people, so many jewelry makers! It is Mr. Gerovitz who has overseen the change of neighborhoods into Manhattanized paradises for the bespectacled.

“It’s like stepping into another dimension. You think there must be some place where all the decent apartments are hiding,” said the novelist Susan Choi, who showed up at the party later. “When we worked with Allan, we thought, ‘Oh, this is where they are!’”

It works like this, or once upon a time it did: You decide to move to Brooklyn. Someone says, “Go see Allan.” Their confidence impresses you, and you think, “Yay!” And then come the more difficult instructions: “But be very nice, and say I referred you and— Jesus Christ!—be on time. He’ll only help you if he likes you.”

You will be offended in advance and return to your comfortable despair. (What indignity—to be rejected by someone you desperately want to give money to!) Then they’ll say again, “But, really, go see Allan.”

And perhaps you too shall rent 700 square feet near the subway. After a bit of ritual suffering, that is. (I know. He found me my first place.)

Mr. Gerovitz had divided his party into two shifts: landlords and renters. “You don’t often see a flamboyant guy like him hanging out with Italian guys, but there they are,” a former client said. At the party, men in floral button-downs and shorts and ladies in print dresses and pumps milled around, basking in their “I Own Property” confidence. A table of presents was packed—wine, cards, pretty gift baggies, some from as far as Martha’s Vineyard. A large blue hand-painted banner declared, “It’s About Us!” Signed: “AMG.”

The invitation had also declared “It’s About Us!” (The front read “The Party You’ve Requested.”) “Us!” apparently referred to all of Prudential Douglas Elliman, the enormous real-estate firm that bought mom-and-pop Marilyn A. Donahue Real Estate, Mr. Gerovitz’s longtime home, a few years ago.

But celebrating Allan, who endured quite a few changes during the corporate transition (technology, seminars, suits), seemed to be the point. At such a party, Mr. Gerovitz could show his new co-workers the result of two decades of work. And he could show the neighborhood that his man-of-the-street image hadn’t gone the way of Corcoran.

“He’s more like a matchmaker,” said Elizabeth Betteil, who’s lived on Henry Street for seven years. She and her husband admitted they’d rather charge under-market rates, as Allan suggests, than work with any other broker. “We told him we wanted a single female; he came back with a man with a child. He’s found us perfect tenants. Allan’s the reason I work in the industry.”

Laura James, a fund-raiser who’s owned in Carroll Gardens since the 80s, also invoked Cupid. “He’s the only broker I give an exclusive to; I love all my tenants,” she said. “Julianna Margulies was a tenant of mine.”

At some point in the evening, a younger and more boisterous group of people had gathered together, talking loudly, throwing their heads back, gesticulating in exaggeratedly joyful ways, every now and then pretending to dance. These were the Douglas Elliman brokers. Marilyn Donahue, Mr. Gerovitz’s old boss, dutifully led me to their new boss, Dottie Herman, the C.E.O. of Elliman. She was tan and blond, and dressed in a white blazer and white heels; a zebra-ish print skirt swung somewhere in between.

“Tell her how many rentals you do!” someone said to Mr. Gerovitz. “One hundred and fifty a year!”

“The cell phone! He has a cell phone!” Ms. Herman said of Mr. Gerovitz, who someone had dragged over.

“I never used a cell phone before. I hate cell phones,” he said.

“One hundred and fifty apartments?” I said.

“One hundred and twenty, 150,” he said.

“What’s normal?”

“Thirty,” another guy said.

“Is this true?”

“He’s an icon. An icon!” Ms. Herman said. “In rentals.”

Real-estate brokers are chatty and tiring, so I sat down next to three middle-aged native Brooklynites. They were not going to the French bistro Bar Tabac. “I’m hungry, you hungry?” “I’m hungry.” “We’ll go to the dinah.” “The appetizas didn’t quite do it!” “You got a big appetite!” “Where will we go?” “The dinah! I said, the dinah across the street!”

A young lawyer named Rachel Zublatt showed up. Before finding her and her boyfriend Andrew their apartment on Baltic between Court and Smith, Mr. Gerovitz said to her: “I think you’re a strong couple—you’re a little too loud and he balances that.” Andrew, standing nearby, pretended to choke to death.

“We canceled a trip to Napa to take this apartment,” Ms. Zublatt said gravely.

A FEW DAYS LATER IN HIS OFFICE, Mr. Gerovitz was only too happy to dwell on his customers’ satisfaction. And, as if it has been staged, a woman eventually shuffled in bearing gifts: She’d painted him a small watercolor. “See, this is why I needed a new apartment. I do these on my floor,” she said.

“Look at this! Look at this! Right in front of the reporter!” he exclaimed, grinning broadly. Mr. Gerovitz happily pointed out his new gray-blue Theory blazer, found after three and a half hours at Bloomingdale’s, and sipped on a Dr. Pepper. He merely smiled when asked his age. At one point, he put his bare feet on the desk. Books were lined up: The Tipping Point, Change the Way You See Everything, Ken Blanchard’s Raving Fans, Never Eat Alone, by Keith Ferrazzi. When I had first stepped into Mr. Gerovitz’s office, as a client, some years ago, the desk had been decorated with thank-you letters. They were gone.

“A couple of years ago, I threw about 100 letters out,” he said, citing depression. But Mr. Gerovitz eventually revealed two binders stuffed with thank-you letters; he encourages clients to write in. One was from Ms. Choi, printed on New Yorker letterhead and titled “Annals of Apartment Hunting.” Another was from the novelist Rick Moody (“P.S. Book collectors pay money for my signature, so save this letter.”)

Mr. Gerovitz laid out his philosophy. He gives weight to referrals and repeaters. He demands that clients see no other brokers. When people come to see him, they must pass “sit-down time,” in which he figures out why they’re moving and what their needs are: And the couple counseling? “I don’t want to see one person dragged into an apartment that won’t be good for them,” he said. Lastly: “The most important thing,” he said, “is that people don’t overspend so they can save money and buy eventually.”

As for landlords, he’s stopped working with them if they aren’t up to snuff. If they reject someone with a baby, “I read them the riot act,” he said. Once, he told a landlord to spend more time with her noisemaking child. “It’s nice that everybody doesn’t feel they have to gouge,” he said. “It’s going to be pretty boring around here if everybody pays over $2,000 in rent—that’s not the kind of neighborhood I want to live in.

“I like to like the customer. And if somebody is like this”—he turned his nose up with his pointer finger—“it doesn’t work for me,” he said, and acknowledged his own blue-collar roots. He’s from Bloomfield, Conn.

But what about the yelling?

“Yeah,” he said, matter-of-factly. “It’s fair, as long as you’re tough on everyone. I want to believe your story, to learn what I’m hearing is real. So I push a little bit.”

THE INITIAL VISIT TO MR. GEROVITZ'S involves a combination of demands, suspicion and odd insults. And some people—frightened, angry—never go back.

“There’s something Machiavellian about what he does,” said one former client, who added that the broker “worked a fucking miracle” for him. “It’s 60-40: his own craziness and the Machiavellian thing. His way of testing your reliability is to press you, and it isn’t pleasant …. A lot of kids who come and want to live in Brooklyn, and they think they know everything about the world because they read Gawker, and they want a real-estate broker to be a certain way—his method goes against that grain.”

In my case, Mr. Gerovitz took note of my height (I’m tall). One meeting, he didn’t like my hat; the next, it was my skirt that disappointed him. A friend recalled the time the broker called him a “pig” in Yiddish—merely for wondering if there were any places in the neighborhood closer to his partner’s work.

But rarely is the thick-skinned Allanite disappointed with their apartment. Mr. Gerovitz is typically insightful enough to land a client a dwelling on the first try, often in mere hours and—most surprisingly in this post-gentrification depression era—for a relatively decent price. (“Suzy,” he said to me like a game-show host, “I think I have the apartment for you.”)

The referrals help. Ms. Choi hired Mr. Gerovitz on novelist Francisco Goldman’s word; Mr. Goldman, by e-mail from Mexico, expressed guilt for having not visited Mr. Gerovitz in a while. (Mr. Gerovitz is good at eliciting guilt.) Of Brooklyn, it’s tough to say which came first, the writers or Mr. Gerovitz.

But it’s true that he likes “creative types.” Mr. Gerovitz particularly loves New York Times Magazine editor Alex Star, who used Mr. Gerovitz twice, and recommended Mr. Gerovitz to New Yorker writer Alex Ross.

Mr. Ross, in turn, said that during his introductory interview with Mr. Gerovitz, he met Ted Koppel, who’d come into the office with his son. “It’s the closest I came to being a guest on Nightline,” Mr. Ross said. He recalled a bit of dialogue from the day: “Mr. Koppel, this is Alex Ross. He writes for New York magazine,” said Mr. Gerovitz. “Indeed!” said Mr. Koppel. “Uh, actually, The New Yorker,” said Mr. Ross. “Well, I won’t hold that against you,” said Mr. Koppel.

Urban legend has it that another magazine writer was thrown out of Mr. Gerovitz’s car. A couple of people suggested it was Mr. Ross (it was not). Instead, this unfortunate writer, who requested anonymity, clarified that “it was not quite that dramatic,” but that after seeing three apartments and finding them sub-par, Mr. Gerovitz did in fact say, “That’s it! You’re hopeless! Get out of my car!”

New York Times reporter Jodi Kantor endured a sort of rental bake-off with other potential clients, in which the landlord got to choose who they liked better—as they anxiously stood around in the landlord’s living room. On another occasion, back in the slightly sketchier late 90’s, Ms. Kantor, just out of college, had brought her mother along on the hunt. Ms. Kantor hesitated before jumping at an apartment that Mr. Gerovitz had shown them. “Your daughter is a princess!” Mr. Gerovitz said. “If my daughter were a princess,” Kantor mère replied, “she wouldn’t be looking in this neighborhood.”

Sadly, Ms. Kantor didn’t make it to the party, though she expressed affection for Mr. Gerovitz. Two journalism types who did show up for the late-night festivities were New York magazine editor Jared Hohlt (who also said it might have been the ubiquitous Mr. Ross who recommended him, but he’s not sure) and reporter Felipe Ossa.

“When he met me and my boyfriend, Allan declared that I was the ‘dry white wine of the relationship,’” Mr. Hohlt said later by e-mail, “which wasn’t exactly flattering but wasn’t entirely inaccurate, either.”

Mr. Gerovitz was right about my hat, too. Perhaps that’s why he did not invite me to the party, but word travels fast in his weird sub-community. That night, across the room, I spotted the woman who rents to my friends, the ones who told me to go through Mr. Gerovitz. And standing outside the restaurant later, the music having faded from Motown to the Killers, I ran into someone I’d sent along to him: Mina Mishrikey, a 28-year-old sales trader.

Inside, Mr. Mishrikey introduced me to two lawyers he’d just met: Vivian Huelgo, 33, and Emilia Sicilia, 32. “We totally love Allan,” Ms. Huelgo said. “We developed a relationship—we even asked him about single men.”

I mentioned this to Mr. Gerovitz later. “Well, you can say: I’m looking too,” he said. “I’m ready.”

I don’t entirely disagree with Mr. Reed’s suggestion that the plot of Inside Man is little short of preposterous as it plays out, though I didn’t find the enterprise as a whole as painfully unbearable as he did. This would not be enough to make me re-review the movie, as it were, for The Observer’s readers, if it were not for some additional elements in the viewing equation dictating my response.

For one thing, Inside Man is to my knowledge the first Spike Lee–directed feature to be No. 1 at the box office in the first week of its release. With Mr. Lee nearing 50, he has been banging at the door for close to 20 years, with 15 or so shoestring or close-to-shoestring productions garnering more personal publicity than commensurate critical or popular applause. One could conclude that he has made a second career of shooting off his mouth, and as one of the victims of a Spike tongue-lashing, I speak from bitter (though not entirely undeserved) experience. After all, I started all the negativity by declaring that he was a better actor than a director, and that his “artistic” flourishes were generally pretentious and extraneous to his narratives.

As it happens, I associate him with one of the most miserable media experiences in my life, though I don’t blame Mr. Lee nearly as much as I do the celebrated “social conscience” of Ted Koppel on one of his old Nightline programs. I had been invited to appear with Mr. Lee and fellow black civil-rights activist and filmmaker Ossie Davis (1917-2005) at about the time in the late 80’s or early 90’s when Norman Jewison had been scheduled to direct Malcolm X and Mr. Lee had loudly and publicly protested that no white director was “qualified” to bring the story of Malcolm X to the screen. It soon became evident that I was on the program to support Mr. Koppel’s contention that Mr. Lee’s expressed attitude was an example of “reverse racism,” but I was having none of it in view of the shameful racial bigotries that have marked so much of American film history. I said so despite the negativity flowing between me and Mr. Lee—indeed, Mr. Koppel was visibly agitated when I noted at the outset that I seemed to be the “token white” on the program. Nor was he conspicuously enchanted when I suggested that blacks were entitled to employ almost any tactic they saw fit to get into a game from which they had been so long excluded.

Nonetheless, throughout the program I was dumbfounded by Mr. Koppel’s singularly totalitarian technical M.O., which served to keep me from making any actual direct eye contact with Mr. Koppel, Mr. Lee or Davis. Before the show, Mr. Lee and Davis sat with me in the studio. Once the show was to begin, we were each escorted into separate booths, each with a monitor and a man operating a camera. When Mr. Koppel wanted to put any of us on the screen, he pressed a button, and he pressed another when he wanted to take any of us off. I had never been on a show like this before, and I have never been on one since. I began to understand what the Stockholm Syndrome was all about once I realized that Mr. Koppel had life-and-death power over the duration of my television exposure. I so yearned to say anything that would keep him happy with me on the screen that I tried to be clever but modest, compliant but original, cheerful but serious. Of course, I failed dismally. Zap went Mr. Koppel’s finger on the out button, and zap went the strings of my heart.

Anyway, Inside Man starts encouragingly enough with a seemingly well-organized bank robbery, full of technological expertise and flavorsome urban angst. Clive Owen’s Dalton Russell seems to have matters well in hand as the evil-genius narrator. The special effects look expensive and are executed with an efficiency that suggests that producer Brian Grazer has given Mr. Lee enough money to be slick in the old, despised Hollywood manner. I was glad to see Christopher Plummer as Arthur Case, the bank president bearing the guilt of something evil hidden in a safe-deposit box.

I gloried in the sheer spectacle of Jodie Foster as Madeline White, an exquisitely groomed, fearlessly feline fixer striding on her high heels and her high horse into one supposedly perilous situation after another. Pure fantasy—but why not if the budget can afford it? Some snappy dialogue even reconciled me to the idea of Denzel Washington as Detective Keith Frazier, a hostage negotiator still learning the ropes, and Chiwetel Ejiofor as Detective Bill Mitchell, his equally sassy sidekick—two elegantly named dudes with quick comebacks for every crooked municipal situation and crucial inner-city balcony audience.

The problem begins when we start to suspect that, despite all the petty humiliations inflicted on the hostages, nothing really nasty is afoot. The pretended malignancy is without fangs or even teeth: Mr. Owen’s ringleader, like Mr. Washington’s cop, are both on the side of the angels in redressing an ancient grievance connected with the Holocaust. Nothing is stolen from the bank except a jewel misappropriated long ago. No one is killed or even hurt, despite all the noise and hoopla. The guns are all fake, as is the apparent killing of a hostage supposedly recorded by a police camera.

The trouble is that the audience has been led down a garden path for much of the running time by a profusion of tough talk and menacing gestures. When the hostages are told to strip down to their underwear so they can don masks and painters coats that make them indistinguishable from the already unrecognizable bank robbers, the resultantly titillating striptease is immediately de-eroticized by the ridiculous refusal of a woman of a certain age even to partially undress.

The prevalence of larcenous subjects in movies these days doesn’t disturb me in this real-life Gilded Age of rampant acquisitiveness, luxurious display and all-time levels of income inequality. What surprises me is that the increasingly squeezed middle class hasn’t taken to the streets as the economically threatened students in Paris have. The next best thing is fantasizing about redistributing the wealth by watching photogenic felons in movies and on television trying to reorder the pecking order in our capitalist society without violating the taboo against collective effort. Long live American individualism and exceptionalism!

Hopeless

Svetozar Ristovski’s Mirage, from a screenplay by Grace Lea Troje and Mr. Ristovski (in Macedonian/Albanian, with English subtitles) fully lives up to its opening quote from Nietzsche: “Hope is the worst of evils, for it prolongs the torments of man.” The film’s protagonist, 12-year-old Marko (Mustafa Kovacevic), is a seemingly indestructible witness to and victim of the chaos and corruption in the new state of Macedonia. His father is an irresponsible drunk and gambler; his mother is a screeching shrew. Marko is bullied by a group of fellow students with familial ties to the corrupt police. His teacher (Marko Nadarevic) is an ineffectual pedagogue who cannot keep order in his own classroom, but he promises Marko that if the boy enters his poetry in an international contest and wins, he’ll be given an all-expenses-paid trip to Paris.

Marko is frequently beaten by the bullies who equate his comparative bookishness with effeminacy, but this avenue is never explored. Instead, Marko is gradually disillusioned to the point that he borrows his father’s revolver to mete out retribution to those who have abused and deceived him. (The director himself has abandoned Macedonia to live in Canada.) In the film, Marko never goes to Paris; instead, he is left at the end after having pulled the trigger of a gun with which he has achieved some revenge for his lost hopes. It is not often that one is confronted with a cinematic social statement so nihilistic and so devoid of hope—not merely for an individual, but for the whole world around him. The character of Marko himself is far from crushed in the process, but is instead somewhat liberated by taking matters into his own hands.

Strangers Off a Train

Sarah Watt’s Look Both Ways is derived from her own screenplay, with animated sequences on which she collaborated with Emma Kelly and Claire Callinan. The combined effect of the live-action and animated cinematography is one of piquant paranoia, hysterical hypochondria and merrily mordant melancholy. In Ms. Watt’s world in a ramshackle community somewhere in southern Australia, we are all by extension accident-prone—or think we are or at least hallucinate we are—and when we are done with our visions of disaster, the omnipresent media pick up where we left off. If you don’t enjoy being reminded that we are all going to die some time or other, some of us more outlandishly, more outrageously and more ridiculously than others, you might want to pass on Look Both Ways. (I am reminded that American visitors to London were once given two life-saving words as a pedestrian’s mantra: “Look right!”)

As it happens, I was amused by the bubbly fun that Ms. Watt generated with her hybrid form of storytelling. Her director’s statement is certainly forthright enough: “I remember sitting on a train, thinking about what my fellow travelers weren’t revealing to me. Were they on the brink of something wonderful or something terrible? Could one person’s knowledge help another?

“I also imagined our train hurtling over the railing and into the chemical storage facility—killing us all in a poisonous inferno. Was anyone else feeling the same way? I set out to make a romantic comedy, but the stuff of most people’s lives includes what we think of as tragedy, so Look Both Ways ended up a bit of both, I guess. I like searching for the universal aspects of people’s experiences, in both the big and the little things. I tried to keep everything as real as I could to allow people to receive the film as part of their own experience, and to bring their own lives to it.”

In this last-named objective, I think Ms. Watt has succeeded, at least as far as this reviewer is concerned. Perhaps he happens to be of an age to heed Yogi Berra’s sage advice to attend other people’s memorial services because otherwise they won’t attend your own. More likely, Ms. Watt succeeds because she seems to have poured so much of herself and her profession into her lead character, Meryl (Justine Clarke). Meryl is a carelessly dressed painter, who, after fantasizing in playful cartoon-speak about any number of violent occurrences, happens to witness a freakish real-life accident: A slow-moving freight train crashes into a man on the tracks who has tripped and fallen while trying to rescue an imperiled dog.

The reverberations of this accident extend far beyond Meryl when a journalist named Nick (William McInnes, Ms. Watt’s real-life husband) writes up the accident for the local newspaper as a front-page think piece on the vagaries of existence. Nick first encounters Meryl on the site of the accident and eventually tries to date her. In the meantime, he is diagnosed with a pernicious form of cancer and a discouraging prognosis for his own survival. The painterly side of Ms. Watt is shown in an exploration of the malignant inroads of the rampaging cancer cells inside Nick’s body. We have become acclimated to this invasive form of animation in medical dramas like House and Grey’s Anatomy, and medical crime shows like CSI and Bones.

The other strands of the narrative in Look Both Ways are picked up by the accident victim’s widow, the guilt-ridden engineer who drove the train into the victim, a pregnant ex-mistress of one of Nick’s journalistic colleagues contemplating an abortion, and various sets of parents coping with the demands of their children. The often-intersecting characters are rendered in virtually perpetual motion as they seek to pull together the connections that seem permanently unraveled. Look Both Ways isn’t a great film; it’s a bit too tentatively exploratory for that. But it is a marvelously promising first film, and Australia continues to amaze us with its steady procession of deliciously appealing young actresses. What is going on in that outback anyhow?

I don’t entirely disagree with Mr. Reed’s suggestion that the plot of Inside Man is little short of preposterous as it plays out, though I didn’t find the enterprise as a whole as painfully unbearable as he did. This would not be enough to make me re-review the movie, as it were, for The Observer’s readers, if it were not for some additional elements in the viewing equation dictating my response.

For one thing, Inside Man is to my knowledge the first Spike Lee–directed feature to be No. 1 at the box office in the first week of its release. With Mr. Lee nearing 50, he has been banging at the door for close to 20 years, with 15 or so shoestring or close-to-shoestring productions garnering more personal publicity than commensurate critical or popular applause. One could conclude that he has made a second career of shooting off his mouth, and as one of the victims of a Spike tongue-lashing, I speak from bitter (though not entirely undeserved) experience. After all, I started all the negativity by declaring that he was a better actor than a director, and that his “artistic” flourishes were generally pretentious and extraneous to his narratives.

As it happens, I associate him with one of the most miserable media experiences in my life, though I don’t blame Mr. Lee nearly as much as I do the celebrated “social conscience” of Ted Koppel on one of his old Nightline programs. I had been invited to appear with Mr. Lee and fellow black civil-rights activist and filmmaker Ossie Davis (1917-2005) at about the time in the late 80’s or early 90’s when Norman Jewison had been scheduled to direct Malcolm X and Mr. Lee had loudly and publicly protested that no white director was “qualified” to bring the story of Malcolm X to the screen. It soon became evident that I was on the program to support Mr. Koppel’s contention that Mr. Lee’s expressed attitude was an example of “reverse racism,” but I was having none of it in view of the shameful racial bigotries that have marked so much of American film history. I said so despite the negativity flowing between me and Mr. Lee—indeed, Mr. Koppel was visibly agitated when I noted at the outset that I seemed to be the “token white” on the program. Nor was he conspicuously enchanted when I suggested that blacks were entitled to employ almost any tactic they saw fit to get into a game from which they had been so long excluded.

Nonetheless, throughout the program I was dumbfounded by Mr. Koppel’s singularly totalitarian technical M.O., which served to keep me from making any actual direct eye contact with Mr. Koppel, Mr. Lee or Davis. Before the show, Mr. Lee and Davis sat with me in the studio. Once the show was to begin, we were each escorted into separate booths, each with a monitor and a man operating a camera. When Mr. Koppel wanted to put any of us on the screen, he pressed a button, and he pressed another when he wanted to take any of us off. I had never been on a show like this before, and I have never been on one since. I began to understand what the Stockholm Syndrome was all about once I realized that Mr. Koppel had life-and-death power over the duration of my television exposure. I so yearned to say anything that would keep him happy with me on the screen that I tried to be clever but modest, compliant but original, cheerful but serious. Of course, I failed dismally. Zap went Mr. Koppel’s finger on the out button, and zap went the strings of my heart.

Anyway, Inside Man starts encouragingly enough with a seemingly well-organized bank robbery, full of technological expertise and flavorsome urban angst. Clive Owen’s Dalton Russell seems to have matters well in hand as the evil-genius narrator. The special effects look expensive and are executed with an efficiency that suggests that producer Brian Grazer has given Mr. Lee enough money to be slick in the old, despised Hollywood manner. I was glad to see Christopher Plummer as Arthur Case, the bank president bearing the guilt of something evil hidden in a safe-deposit box.

I gloried in the sheer spectacle of Jodie Foster as Madeline White, an exquisitely groomed, fearlessly feline fixer striding on her high heels and her high horse into one supposedly perilous situation after another. Pure fantasy—but why not if the budget can afford it? Some snappy dialogue even reconciled me to the idea of Denzel Washington as Detective Keith Frazier, a hostage negotiator still learning the ropes, and Chiwetel Ejiofor as Detective Bill Mitchell, his equally sassy sidekick—two elegantly named dudes with quick comebacks for every crooked municipal situation and crucial inner-city balcony audience.

The problem begins when we start to suspect that, despite all the petty humiliations inflicted on the hostages, nothing really nasty is afoot. The pretended malignancy is without fangs or even teeth: Mr. Owen’s ringleader, like Mr. Washington’s cop, are both on the side of the angels in redressing an ancient grievance connected with the Holocaust. Nothing is stolen from the bank except a jewel misappropriated long ago. No one is killed or even hurt, despite all the noise and hoopla. The guns are all fake, as is the apparent killing of a hostage supposedly recorded by a police camera.

The trouble is that the audience has been led down a garden path for much of the running time by a profusion of tough talk and menacing gestures. When the hostages are told to strip down to their underwear so they can don masks and painters coats that make them indistinguishable from the already unrecognizable bank robbers, the resultantly titillating striptease is immediately de-eroticized by the ridiculous refusal of a woman of a certain age even to partially undress.

The prevalence of larcenous subjects in movies these days doesn’t disturb me in this real-life Gilded Age of rampant acquisitiveness, luxurious display and all-time levels of income inequality. What surprises me is that the increasingly squeezed middle class hasn’t taken to the streets as the economically threatened students in Paris have. The next best thing is fantasizing about redistributing the wealth by watching photogenic felons in movies and on television trying to reorder the pecking order in our capitalist society without violating the taboo against collective effort. Long live American individualism and exceptionalism!

Hopeless

Svetozar Ristovski’s Mirage, from a screenplay by Grace Lea Troje and Mr. Ristovski (in Macedonian/Albanian, with English subtitles) fully lives up to its opening quote from Nietzsche: “Hope is the worst of evils, for it prolongs the torments of man.” The film’s protagonist, 12-year-old Marko (Mustafa Kovacevic), is a seemingly indestructible witness to and victim of the chaos and corruption in the new state of Macedonia. His father is an irresponsible drunk and gambler; his mother is a screeching shrew. Marko is bullied by a group of fellow students with familial ties to the corrupt police. His teacher (Marko Nadarevic) is an ineffectual pedagogue who cannot keep order in his own classroom, but he promises Marko that if the boy enters his poetry in an international contest and wins, he’ll be given an all-expenses-paid trip to Paris.

Marko is frequently beaten by the bullies who equate his comparative bookishness with effeminacy, but this avenue is never explored. Instead, Marko is gradually disillusioned to the point that he borrows his father’s revolver to mete out retribution to those who have abused and deceived him. (The director himself has abandoned Macedonia to live in Canada.) In the film, Marko never goes to Paris; instead, he is left at the end after having pulled the trigger of a gun with which he has achieved some revenge for his lost hopes. It is not often that one is confronted with a cinematic social statement so nihilistic and so devoid of hope—not merely for an individual, but for the whole world around him. The character of Marko himself is far from crushed in the process, but is instead somewhat liberated by taking matters into his own hands.

Strangers Off a Train

Sarah Watt’s Look Both Ways is derived from her own screenplay, with animated sequences on which she collaborated with Emma Kelly and Claire Callinan. The combined effect of the live-action and animated cinematography is one of piquant paranoia, hysterical hypochondria and merrily mordant melancholy. In Ms. Watt’s world in a ramshackle community somewhere in southern Australia, we are all by extension accident-prone—or think we are or at least hallucinate we are—and when we are done with our visions of disaster, the omnipresent media pick up where we left off. If you don’t enjoy being reminded that we are all going to die some time or other, some of us more outlandishly, more outrageously and more ridiculously than others, you might want to pass on Look Both Ways. (I am reminded that American visitors to London were once given two life-saving words as a pedestrian’s mantra: “Look right!”)

As it happens, I was amused by the bubbly fun that Ms. Watt generated with her hybrid form of storytelling. Her director’s statement is certainly forthright enough: “I remember sitting on a train, thinking about what my fellow travelers weren’t revealing to me. Were they on the brink of something wonderful or something terrible? Could one person’s knowledge help another?

“I also imagined our train hurtling over the railing and into the chemical storage facility—killing us all in a poisonous inferno. Was anyone else feeling the same way? I set out to make a romantic comedy, but the stuff of most people’s lives includes what we think of as tragedy, so Look Both Ways ended up a bit of both, I guess. I like searching for the universal aspects of people’s experiences, in both the big and the little things. I tried to keep everything as real as I could to allow people to receive the film as part of their own experience, and to bring their own lives to it.”

In this last-named objective, I think Ms. Watt has succeeded, at least as far as this reviewer is concerned. Perhaps he happens to be of an age to heed Yogi Berra’s sage advice to attend other people’s memorial services because otherwise they won’t attend your own. More likely, Ms. Watt succeeds because she seems to have poured so much of herself and her profession into her lead character, Meryl (Justine Clarke). Meryl is a carelessly dressed painter, who, after fantasizing in playful cartoon-speak about any number of violent occurrences, happens to witness a freakish real-life accident: A slow-moving freight train crashes into a man on the tracks who has tripped and fallen while trying to rescue an imperiled dog.

The reverberations of this accident extend far beyond Meryl when a journalist named Nick (William McInnes, Ms. Watt’s real-life husband) writes up the accident for the local newspaper as a front-page think piece on the vagaries of existence. Nick first encounters Meryl on the site of the accident and eventually tries to date her. In the meantime, he is diagnosed with a pernicious form of cancer and a discouraging prognosis for his own survival. The painterly side of Ms. Watt is shown in an exploration of the malignant inroads of the rampaging cancer cells inside Nick’s body. We have become acclimated to this invasive form of animation in medical dramas like House and Grey’s Anatomy, and medical crime shows like CSI and Bones.

The other strands of the narrative in Look Both Ways are picked up by the accident victim’s widow, the guilt-ridden engineer who drove the train into the victim, a pregnant ex-mistress of one of Nick’s journalistic colleagues contemplating an abortion, and various sets of parents coping with the demands of their children. The often-intersecting characters are rendered in virtually perpetual motion as they seek to pull together the connections that seem permanently unraveled. Look Both Ways isn’t a great film; it’s a bit too tentatively exploratory for that. But it is a marvelously promising first film, and Australia continues to amaze us with its steady procession of deliciously appealing young actresses. What is going on in that outback anyhow?