Bovie Movie

French/Israeli filmmaker Eyal Sivan has fashioned an unusual documentary about the Holocaust from video footage (originally shot for American television) of the 1961 trial of Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann. Using sophisticated editing techniques and digital image manipulation to give the visuals a distinctive look, Un Specialiste/The Specialist focuses less on Eichmann as the monstrous architect of one of the 20th century’s most heinous crimes, and more on a subtly terrifying notion: Eichmann was a seemingly ordinary and mild-mannered fellow who was also capable of planning the mass evacuation of Jews and other “undesirables” to extermination camps, denying any legal responsibility with the words: “That was unfortunate, but it wasn’t my fault.” Along with extensive footage of Eichmann’s testimony, Sivan also devotes significant screen time to testimony of survivors of the death camps. Un Specialiste/The Specialist was screened at the 1999 Berlin Film Festival’s as part of a special program entitled “Documents Against Forgetting.”

In this fast-paced military thriller, Tom Berenger is Thomas Beckett, a tough, grizzled, U.S. Marine Corps veteran sharpshooter who goes through target-spotter partners faster than bullets on his ultra-dangerous missions. The National Security Council secretly assigns Beckett to assassinate a Panamanian rebel bankrolled by a drug cartel in his bid for the presidency. The NSC also gives Beckett a sidekick: raw recruit Richard Miller (Billy Zane), a former Olympic marksman who’s never killed anybody. Miller technically outranks the more experienced Beckett, a source of friction between the men as they make their way through the jungle to find their prey. Once they locate their target, Beckett and Miller not only have to pull off a complex shooting but also must avoid a covert shooter who’s been trained by Beckett and is now gunning for them. A Panama native, director ($Luis Llosa later repeated the trick of crafting a visually exciting genre film out of thin material with Anaconda (1997).