Abstract

Films

It's not the first movie to propose that a woman might feel better for seeing her husband dead, or to treat her to the supposed pleasures of coming unhinged. the film "Nurse Betty" isn't even the first to toss Renée Zellweger into a story premised on comic madness. Only a few months have passed since her eyes those two shallow trenches, set on fire in a face like an Iowa cornfield witnessed the release through trauma of actor Jim Carrey's repressed self. To praise the film "Paragraph 175," the new documentary by Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman, is both pointless and necessary. Necessary, because the filmmakers have again brought their sound judgment, well-balanced intelligence and smooth professional skills to a historic subject of continuing importance. Pointless, because that subject the persecution and murder of gay men in Nazi Germany that overwhelms mere movie-reviewing.