"Equine therapist" just doesn't sound as good as "horse whisperer," although that's the term to describe Buck Brannaman's specialty as a trainer of troubled horses. In fact, the subject of the lovely documentary Buck doesn't even whisper: he talks into a microphone so that the rapt horse owners can watch and hear him magically fixing whatever ails their seemingly impossible horses. Not having an impossible horse, or any horse, I assumed there would be a limit ...

Is a crusading French documentary maker striking a blow at the abusive powers of television — or simply taking reality TV to a new low of cynicism and bad taste? That's the question viewers across France are asking in light of Christophe Nick's new film, The Game of Death, which airs on French television on Wednesday night. The documentary has generated a massive amount of attention — and naturally, courted controversy — because of the dilemma that the film's contestants ...

Retired Major General Joseph McChristian looked straight at the jury in a Manhattan federal courtroom last week, recalling a day in May 1967. He had brought to General William Westmoreland a carefully researched proposal to virtually double the official estimate of enemy troops in Viet Nam. "I stood in front of his desk, and I handed it to him," McChristian said. "I gave him a little bit of background on what it was. He read it. He looked up at ...

Last summer, when nearly 2 million vacationers descended on California's Yosemite National Park, the line of cars at the South Entrance was often nearly a mile long. Rangers walked from car to car pacifying irritated visitors with free maps and friendly advice, but during particularly busy periods, they gave up, raised the gates and waved folks through just to keep the crowd moving. When conservationist John Muir helped create Yosemite in 1890, he could walk for hours in the ...

J.K. Rowling tells Oprah Winfrey she 'could' write more Harry Potter books. But should she? In an interview scheduled to air today on "The Oprah Winfrey Show," J.K. Rowling tells the Queen of All Media that she "could definitely" write more books in the Harry Potter series. She doesn't say she will, mind you, just that it's possible. Which is a big deal to Leaky Cauldron lurkers since, in the past, Rowling has insisted that "Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows" marked ...

One of the criticisms most frequently lobbed at Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth is that he has his facts wrong about the snows of Kilimanjaro. Yes, those immortal snows are vanishing , as Gore's global-warming documentary contends, but they've been receding since the early 1900s at least — long before the planet began to warm. Now that bit of fact-checking is looking a lot less convincing with the publication of a study on Tuesday in the Proceedings of the ...

It's been a Monty Python world lately -- and we're not even talking about the absurdity and silliness of current events, such as balloon boys and confessional celebrities. No, it's a Python world on TV, with the lads being showcased in an multipart IFC documentary -- which started this week -- and re-airing of their classic TV episodes and movies. Last week, the paparazzi were out in New York to see the group, a bunch of self-confessed silly old ...

The Los Angeles Times' headquarters aptly sits where the U.S. Army corralled camels during the Civil War, when Southern California was a desert with no natural resources. Los Angeles' development from an arid wasteland to a world metropolis and cultural capital is closely linked to the newspaper's rise under the ownership of one family. "It would still be a desert," documentary filmmaker Peter Jones said, if Gen. Harrison Gray Otis didn't arrive in the 1880s to take over the bankrupt ...

A retired prosecutor whose comments in a 2008 HBO documentary threatened to derail a 31-year-old sex case against film director Roman Polanski now says he lied. David Wells told CNN's Wolf Blitzer on Thursday that he "buttered up" his role in the Polanski case for the documentary crew. He said he lied about trying to goad a judge to sentence Polanski to prison in 1978 for having sex with a 13-year-old girl. Wells' comments in "Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired" ...

The events of a single afternoon when she was 13 years old have haunted Samantha Geimer her entire life. A famous movie director allegedly gave her champagne and had sex with her. She is 45 now, and wishes the whole matter would just go away. The arrest of Roman Polanski in Switzerland over the weekend makes that highly unlikely. Geimer is back in the news in connection with the infamous 1977 sex case, whether she likes it or not. It ...