Jay North

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One of the best writers in the US commentariat. There is a lot of fine quality analysis about these ailing times out there. This is outstanding. With the sweep and broad, deep understanding of a great journalist (he has been a Time editor and served in high government office) he not only nails the sorry history of lies but says it very, very well. Five stars, though not adequate recognition for the author’s achievement.

A charlatan of a publication. Not a credible explanation of practical magic but a sideshow tour of 1920’s illustrations of faux miracles with hookum explanations of the kind seen in the back of Ripleys Believe It or Not Comics. The introduction announcing it as the biggest, grandest, most important magic book in all the world gives the carny flavour of the enterprise. A guide to practical workable magic? Don’t make me laugh.

Cambodia's suffering spans so many decades and so many horrors that, for those who are familiar with the country, it takes a great documentarian like Steven Ozakaki to redraw the focus from the totality of events under Pol Pot to the individual realities of people who survived, and - in the case of the person who is subject of this film - who would seek to re-shape the narrative and even profit from it. I have never met Nhem En, but I did meet the late Vann Nath, who always asked for understanding of people like En. The photographer of S-21 represents all the maddening riddles of Khmer society. This outstanding film has a mercilessly clear focus on its subject matter, but leaves out a ringing editorial voice of denunciation. Instead, 'The Conscience of Nhem En' invites one of the functionaries of the most violent revolution of the century to create with his testimony all the evidence we need to draw our own conclusions about the banality of evil. The film's consideration is of universal truths about the delusions and catastrophic self-deceptions of dictatorships, and how, rather than learning the mistakes of the past, revolutionaries repeat them.