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"My father lived in shadows," says filmmaker Carl Colby in voiceover. "He liked being invisible." His documentary is a valiant but ultimately futile attempt to understand William Colby, the ex-CIA head who died in 1996. Who could figure out this close-to-the-vest cold fish who revealed nothing personal to anyone, certainly not to his family, but spent the best days of his life involved in frightening intelligence schemes, including assassinations, while representing the USA? It was Colby who was behind Operation Phoenix in Vietnam, which allowed for the torture and killings of ostensible enemies of the South Vietnamese government. For this reprehensible work, Colby was appointed head of the CIA by Richard Nixon, and soon aided Tricky Dick with his illegal political operations. A great guy? Not really, and fortunately son Carl Colby avoids sentimentalizing his dad. Or really forgiving William Colby his sins as a bloody cold warrior, and as a bloodless, distant father.

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ARTICLES BY GERALD PEARY
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  •   REVIEW: THE CONQUEST  |  December 13, 2011
    Xavier Durringer's dramatized recreation of the rise of France's Nicolas Sarkozy to the presidency is generally fair-minded and ambiguous.
  •   REVIEW: WEEKEND  |  December 06, 2011
    Among the world's masterpieces of misanthropy, Jean-Luc Godard's 1967 opus follows a loathsome, greedy, sexually perverse bourgeois married couple on a weekend jaunt into the French countryside during which they plan to murder the wife's dying father, and then, perhaps, turn viciously on each other.
  •   REVIEW: BURKE & HARE  |  November 29, 2011
    Simon Pegg and Andy Serkis are only faintly humorous as the titular team of assassins, Burke and Hare .
  •   REVIEW: TOMBOY  |  November 29, 2011
    In this lovely feature from the French filmmaker Céline Sciamma, Laure, a 10-year-old tomboy decides after moving into a new neighborhood, to pretend that she's a boy, Mikael, as a way to fit in with the local kids.
  •   REVIEW: TALES FROM THE GOLDEN AGE  |  November 29, 2011
    The ironically titled film refers to the dreadful Alice-in-Wonderland years when Nicolae Ceausescu was the Communist strongman of Romania.

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