Kimberly at Brief Intelligence recommends Orson Welle's The Trial (1963), from the novel By Franz Kafka:

Josef K. awakens one morning to find that he has been arrested by officers who refuse to disclose the charges. His nervous protests estrange his friends and neighbors who proceed to distance themselves while his every action seems to further indict him. Josef's attempts to discover his alleged crime pull him into a perplexing world full of secrets and lies. As the horror and brutality of this nightmare world becomes apparent to Josef, he attempts to fight back with argument, avoidance, disobedience and pleading - all to no avail. Orson Welles' vision of Kafka's world is faithfully disorienting, absurd and suspicious. From the vast, overwhelming courtroom to the wasteland of books and papers in the advocate's office, Josef K. is spectacularly dwarfed by the power and madness surrounding him. Accented by a revolutionary "pinscreen" prologue and remarkable performances by Anthony Perkins and Orson Welles, "The Trial" is a brilliant adaptation of Kafka's masterpiece.

Kimberly calls it "a stunning and chilling achievement" and that "today’s poisonous political climate and the dawn of the Patriot Act give it an especially jarring relevance."

We're still thinking about Mystic River, which we saw two weeks ago. We might want to see it again. Sean Penn was that good and the story was a mystery until the end.

As for reading, now that we've finished two novels, Namesake and the DaVinci Code, we're ready to break into The Brass Wall by NY Times reporter David Kocieniewski.

It's written with the tone and pace of a legal thriller, but at its heart, is an expose--showing how the Guliani Administration allowed the NYPD's good ol' boys to risk the life of an undercover agent and undermine the investigation of two mob-related homicides that remain unsolved. It examines the way New York City handled dangerous police corruption cases during the time the Mollen Commission was supposed to be reforming the NYPD--and when the Abner Louima and Amadou Diallo cases raised concerns that the department's failure to police itself was endangering the public.