You have to assume a lot of malice and malevolence on the filmmakers' part to accept this claim--not to mention a command of cinema I don't recall anywhere in The Basketball Diaries. What worries me more is how our sweet tooth for entertainment now shapes and defines the way we understand the world. In reporting and documentary filmmaking, entertainment is a crutch that helps us make sense of the disorderly, a sweetener that helps us swallow truths that are otherwise unpalatable. Yet any such sweetening is bound to trivialize as much as it illuminates--hence the flood of Littleton stories that fall into predictable patterns, divide the world neatly into heroes and villains, and assume understanding long before any such thing is possible.

These issues are echoed in The Last Days, a harrowing and essential Holocaust documentary that nonetheless shows how inadequate the terms of entertainment are to the task of addressing the unfathomable. The director, James Moll, focuses on five Hungarian survivors of the Nazis' accelerated extermination efforts in the last year of World War II. Their stories and experiences in themselves are horrifying; when coupled with ghostly but unflinching archival footage, they provide a record of inhumanities that defy comprehension--a direct rebuke to the swine who claim the Holocaust never happened.

Unfortunately, the movie comes equipped with a Hans Zimmer score that weighs in at all the wrong moments; it's an insulting touch that tells the audience how to react--let alone that a reaction is demanded, as it would be in an action thriller. The score makes it too easy to view the footage at a distance, as something that has been processed and packaged. And while the survivors' postwar stories are inspiring, they end the film on a note that's too comforting for the harsh truths that precede it.