Category Archives: Releases

Coming to theatres today, Friday, December 30: DR FEELGOOD: DEALER OR HEALER?

Eve Marson’s look at the issue of opioid use debuted at the Los Angeles Film Festival this Summer. Other screenings have included Austin and Tallgrass.

Dr William Hurwitz challenged medical orthodoxy in the 1990s regarding the prescription of opioids and found himself charged with drug trafficking as a result. Based on then-newer clinical studies that countered long-held medical beliefs that such substances invariably led to addiction, Hurwitz felt an ethical mandate to help patients suffering from chronic pain – a notoriously difficult condition to verify in a quantitative way, and thus dependent on patient reporting. For some long-suffering patients, Hurwitz’s willingness to prescribe oxycontin came as a godsend, but also contributed to the explosion of a black market industry and the notice of federal agents, who set up patients as informants to determine if he was purposefully overprescribing to addicts or dealers. Marson allows Hurwitz to tell his story – and maintain his innocence – but also includes the views of critics who blame him for enabling the death or addiction of their loved ones, underscoring the ethical complexities of the issue. While America is still in the midst of an opioid epidemic, the well-told film’s focus on Hurwitz’s case grounds the film a bit too firmly in the past to fully convey a sense of urgency and timeliness, and its unfortunate tabloidesque subtitle also does it no favors.

New to VOD this week: AT THE FORK

John Papola’s exploration of how animals are raised for human consumption debuted in theatres this Summer via Tugg. It is now available on iTunes.

I previously wrote about the doc here.

Coming to PBS’s American Masters tonight, Tuesday, December 27: EERO SAARINEN: THE ARCHITECT WHO SAW THE FUTURE

Peter Rosen’s look at the life and work of the visionary architect debuted at NYC’s Architecture & Design Film Festival this Fall. It now comes to TV as the finale of the PBS program’s 30th season.

The viewer’s guide through Saarinen’s legendary designs is his son, Eric Saarinen, the film’s director of photography and co-producer. Still seeking closure from his father’s premature death at the age of 51, Eric visits several of his father’s projects, from the Gateway Arch and TWA Flight Center to the General Motors Technical Center and Yale’s Ingalls Rink, as he reveals more personal details of his father’s impact on his family. Already placing his wife and children secondary to his career, Eero abandoned them following a love affair with Aline Louchheim, an art critic for the New York Times who became a champion of his work. While Eric’s difficult relationship with his father parallels Eero’s own complicated, competitive relationship with his own father, accomplished architect Eliel Saarinen, the film’s slight running time unfortunately doesn’t permit an extended exploration of this intriguing theme, subordinating the personal to a too-quick, and somewhat surface-level, survey of Eero’s work, which remains, despite this, compelling in its break from modernist convention.