Roman Polanski and Nate Parker both have movies at the Venice Film Festival. Only one is worth seeing
VENICE, Italy - Roman Polanski's "J'accuse (An Officer and a Spy)" and Nate Parker's "American Skin," the two most contentious titles to screen at this year's Venice International Film Festival, are both structured around a trial.
A series of trials, actually, in "J'accuse," Polanski's absorbingly detailed account of the Dreyfus affair. In that famous 19th century scandal, the French Jewish army captain Alfred Dreyfus was accused of spying for Germany, convicted of treason, sentenced to life in prison and ultimately exonerated in a series of retrials that exposed anti-Semitism at the highest levels of the French military and government.
In the contemporary-set drama "American Skin," written and directed by Parker with an exceedingly heavy hand, the trial takes place beyond the confines of the legal system. It's a provocative stunt and a call for justice orchestrated by an African American man (played by Parker himself) grieving his 14-year-old son, who was fatally shot by a white police officer.
Both pictures are dramas of investigation and vindication, focused on the pursuit of justice and the
