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Despite having a strong focus on addiction, My Name Is Joe is more about accepting the consequences of one's conduct than it is about substance misuse. Joe attempts to save another guy in an attempt to make one for his previous transgressions, but he ultimately faces the possibility that he could be causing more harm than good. The alcoholic should understand the significance of personal accountability for the recovery process more than anyone else, but Joe is so preoccupied with his job as rescuer that he fails to see this brutal reality. Only someone who thinks he can take on other people's troubles will be unable to resolve the moral predicament he finally finds himself in, where one option is worse than the others. To his credit, Loach does not provide simple solutions to challenging issues, and unlike in a Hollywood production, things do not always turn out as planned. My Name Is Joe's feeling of harsh reality is its strongest point. The film will leave practically any spectator feeling uneasy since the tragedy and humor are delivered without any hint of dramatization. If a great movie is defined as having two unforgettable sequences and no poor ones, then My Name Is Joe definitely qualifies.

Even though Gorillas in the Mist may not have been able to capture the whole complexity of the real Dian Fossey and her values, it is close enough that almost everyone who sees the film will leave with a greater understanding of her life and work as well as an awareness of how the gorillas are endangered due to human encroachment on their natural habitat. In many respects, this is still a documentary about a place and a period that have already passed because Rwanda was engulfed in a bloody civil war shortly after Fossey's passing. (A large portion of the filming was place on site.) Although it is a side item, I am sure the Apted documentarian finds value in it.

The Alto Knights has enough going on to be interesting to anyone who are interested in criminals from the middle of the 20th century in general and New York's Five Families in particular, but I get the impression it is a rather tiny audience. This is not what anyone looking for anything more akin to The Godfather, Goodfellas, or even The Irishman will discover. It is possible that there are already so many stories about this period of organized crime that the effort to come up with fresh material has led to something that is talky, diluted, and only marginally interesting. Although it is hardly the worst we have seen from either De Niro or Levinson, there is a feeling that combining the two with a Pileggi story ought to have produced better results.