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With the second biggest opening for a documentary in movie history, Sicko will continue to cause unwellness in the health care industry. Moviegoers can find contradictory viewpoints to Michael Moore's theory of the greatness of the British and Canadian health care systems, though: Denys Arcand's The Barbarian Invasion gets in some firm critiquing of the Canadian system when it gets gouged by cutbacks. And Lindsay Anderson's broad satire Britannia Hospital shows an institution plagued Frankenstinean experiments, labor troubles and cannibalism. Since Moore's investigations of single-payer health care elsewhere included Norway (these scenes will probably be seen on the DVD), one could also toss in Lars Von Trier's ie Kingdom (aka Riget later remade by Stephen King) to show that there's something rotten in Scandinavian hospitals, or at least the ones built on hellmouths.

As for Romanian medicine, we've seen what happened to the unfortunate Mr. Lazarescu. At heart, Sicko is about cleaning up our own yard here in the US, not the problems of other countries. And as Moore has been saying, the evidence he presents isn't even news. Kvetching about hospitals goes back to the arch-kvetch Paddy Chayefsky in his 1971 The Hospital. Chayefsky's lines in Network were fresh enough for journalist Greg Palast to quote at length in his book Armed Madhouse...what might Chayefsky have to say about the health care mess that would still ring true 36 years later?

If Al Gore and Davis Guggenheim's recent documentary didn't give you enough about stranded polar bears and frogs in gradually heating pots of water (with scorpions on their backs, stinging them because they can't help it, it's their nature) rejoice; on November 3, the 6,383 screen Regal Cinemas chain will be unrolling the global warming documentary The Great Warming in 50 cities. Narrators include such futurists as Alanis "God" Morissette and Keanu Reeves. It's based on Lydia Dotto's Storm Warning: Gambling With the Climate of Our Planet. Exec producer Karen Coshof notes that Regal--the most geographically diverse chain in the USA -- doesn't usually screen indie docs. If this film sounds familiar, you must be living in the Great White North. The Great Warming was shown in three parts on TV in Canada's version of Discovery Channel three years ago. Apparently such such heresy about melting ice caps and super storms was more socially acceptable up there; Canada, once considered three years behind the United States, must be now counted as three years ahead. Environmental & Energy Publishing's E&E TV notes that this wide opening of The Great Warming is a few days before the all-important congressional elections in the US. But the film intends to be non-partisan. As a contrast to Gore's expert one-man MCing, director Judith Dwan Hallet brings in a few religious sources too; these include a new breed of evangelicals, including Reverend Richard Cizik, who urges his flock to take up the idea of "creation care": God entrusts us to take care of the planet. Wasn't Alanis's word good enough?