His point, in fairness, is that he wants others to take up the call, that his voice for twenty years now, as shrill as it may be, nonetheless has been at the forefront of a particular segment of the American left. However, the film itself feels tired - anybody paying attention won't find anything they don't already know, and even more than some of his other films, this one firmly preaches to the converted.

It must be said that over the last twenty years Moore has gotten very good at making this sort of thing - the pacing is decent, the interviews fairly cogent, and the explicit callbacks to Roger and Me and amusing twist. Still, it all seems like history repeating itself.

Obama gets off pretty cleanly, but he does attack the odd Democrat in Congress. The real bad guys are Madoff, Bush and the Goldman/Sacks boys that infest the Fed/Treasury department, and, really, is anyone still surprised by this?

I'd be amused if Moore could actually make a doc without his iconoclastic imprint. As is stands, compared to his previous work, consider this little more than, uh, "Moore" of the same.

A trite female detective character with a chip on her shoulder further adds to sense of narrative laziness, with trope after trope drawn out towards the inevitable confrontation. Oh, and the Irish are bad guys again, doncha know.

Silly and boring, Caine nonetheless almost miraculously manages to elevate the film into something special. However, it's all for naught, as the rest of the cast do little to make this anything more than a bad episode of television. Frankly, after the Wire, I'm not sure films like Harry Brown should be made any more, we should just all collectively go watch that masterpiece over and over...

Alas, no.

The idea was to actually see a remarkable pair of films, this latest work, and his first from from the silent era, shot some 80 (!) years ago. It would have been remarkable to have seen any form of narrative similarity, some theme that throughout these decades ties the art together to the mind and spirit of one auteur. After this newer work ended, the lights raised, the curtain closed. It seems the festival was not able to get a copy of the older film in time.

As for this contemporary work, we get an almost amateur, terribly trashy "fable" about a man lusting for a nymphet that lives across the street from the store where he works. It's all a bit too silly to describe, but suffice it to say, I've rarely had an hour long film feel like a 3 hour epic.

For those of us mere mortals, this film occupies an hour of a short life that you'll simply never get back.