By John DeFore

While you’re sitting around the table on Thursday, be sure that in addition to giving thanks for whatever combination of fowl and starches sits on the plate you also pay due respect to the water in your glass. As a new documentary insists, it’s not something to take for granted.

FLOW (the title’s an acronym for “for love of water”) is a frightening film full of outrages and dispiriting facts about the state of water here and abroad. Stocked with scary tidbits for Americans who take water safety for granted — Can it be that 40% of the brief but nasty illnesses we attribute to “something we ate” are actually caused by water? Can you believe that drugs like Prozac linger in the water supply so long they’re found in the flesh of fish? — it also travels to areas where the scene is more dire: Bolivia, where the World Bank’s insistence on water privatization led to horrible things; India, where dying of water-borne pathogens is commonplace.

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By John DeFore

The latest edition of an annual report by the International Energy Agency was released this week, and while the news may not be unexpected, it’s unsettling nonetheless.

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By John DeFore

James Bond has often fought men who sought to bend the Earth to their whims. But this time around, the evil scheme is a tad more realistic than a planet-sized death ray.

In the new Quantum of Solace, which opens tomorrow, the super spy’s personal vendetta (he’s hunting the folks who killed his girlfriend in the last movie) leads him into the world of a big-time operator named Dominic Greene, whose name lends itself to a glitzy organization, Greene Planet, that is ostensibly trying to help the environment and the world’s poor.

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By John DeFore

Over the last few years, moviegoers may have come to expect that any documentary pairing scientists and ice caps will be a scare-fest or a sermon — a big-screen effort to hammer home the urgent need to take action countering climate change.
Not so with Encounters at the End of the World, a film [...]

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By John DeFore
Call it a solution to a problem that has ceased to exist: Now that Netflix whisks DVDs to your mailbox and downloadable movies threaten to make all physical home video media obsolete, a company called Flexplay wants to sell movie lovers discs they throw away after a single viewing.

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By Barbara Kessler
King Corn is a documentary about corn, that staple that comes straight from the gently rolling fields of the beautiful heartland to our dinner table.
Well, wait right there. The corn featured in King Corn is not the corn-on-the-cob you remember from last summer, nor is it the buttery side dish that brightens [...]

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