Sydney Pollack’s death at 73 has robbed our cinema of one of its finest … actors. Yes, of course, he directed some terrific movies — Tootsie above all, but also (in descending order) The Way We Were, Three Days of the Condor, They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? and Absence of Malice. But he had a weakness for prestige middlebrow beanbags like Out of Africa (which won him his cherished Oscar), along with A-list money pits like Havana and The Firm and The Interpreter (and The Electric Horseman, and Sabrina, and …) In later years, Pollack had more life in front of the camera than behind it.

I’ve been derelict, for reasons of space (in the print mag) and post-Oscar fatigue, in clanging the bell for two hideously depressing but also enraging documentaries about unchecked growth and the collateral damage in its wake — i.e., the Earth and everyone on it. The Unforeseen is a poetic and high-minded meditation on American developers’ manifest destiny and the cancer it introduces into the natural world. Burning the Future: Coal in America, despite its generalized title, is firmly anchored in West Virginia, that Appalachian bastion of beauty and blight. The latter has the more visceral impact. All you need to see is mountaintops blown off, sludge pouring out of faucets, and little kids weeping every time it rains for fear their houses will be swept away by flash floods to conclude that the most fitting sentence for those responsible (among them George W. Bush, who, according to a sign in an industry flack’s office, [hearts] coal) is life without parole in the hills of West Virginia.