After a viewing of "Sicko" (Lionsgate/Weinstein), Michael Moore's excoriating documentary expose of the American health care system, you may just be tempted to pack your bags and relocate posthaste to Canada, England, France or even Cuba, countries with socialized systems resulting in few if any out-of-pocket expenses for the patient.

From country to country, he roams hospital halls, asking patients how much they have paid for their treatment, and time and again they answer "nothing." In England, he stops at a cashier's window, and chortles that surely this is where patients pay out, only to discover the clerk behind the window is reimbursing patients for cab fare!

A local pharmacist assures him that all prescriptions -- no matter the medicine or dosage -- are sold at the same rate of a little more than $10.

Even the doctors have it better. One shows off his quite comfortable house, and enviable lifestyle, and explains to the incredulous Moore how doctors earn more if they have healthier patients.

In Paris, at a very appealing-looking gathering of expatriate Americans, they speak with awed admiration about the level of care, and pity the deprived folks back home. Moore even discovers doctors who make house calls.

In America, by contrast, insurance rates are beyond the means of 46 million Americans. The list of pre-existing conditions that insurance won't cover, even for those who can afford the premiums, are legion.

Horror stories abound. A comfortably well-off husband and wife are wiped out when he suffers a heart attack, and she gets cancer. A man must decide which of two fingers to save when he's injured by a saw. A frail 79-year-old man cleans toilets so he can remain insured. A young woman in a car crash is told her ambulance cost was not pre-approved. A mother with a gravely ill child is turned away from a hospital not in her network, and the child dies.

When Moore learns that detainees at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, receive state-of-the-art health care, he pulls a typical Moore stunt, by embarking with a boatload of rescue workers from the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks -- whose current health problems are being ignored by the system -- to the U.S. detention facility there. They are denied entrance, as Moore must have predicted, so they detour to Cuba, where they are given extraordinarily compassionate care at Havana Hospital.

Moore's approach is audacious and unabashedly one-sided. We never hear countering arguments. And yet, with his breezy, sardonic commentary, the film is highly entertaining, often funny, and makes a strong case for our current system being strangely at odds with the otherwise humane aspects of the American character, though he's on shakier ground when he suggests the system is part of a nefarious plot to keep us in fearful submission.

But ours being the only country in the free Western world without universal health care, with higher infant-mortality rates and with lower life expectancy than in those other countries are convincing arguments for reform.

The film contains a brief shot of a man stitching his own wound. (A-II, PG-13)

A Mighty Heart
The facts about the 2002 kidnapping and eventual brutal killing of Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl in Pakistan were so widely reported a viewer might understandably approach the film at hand with a certain dread.

And yet, "A Mighty Heart" (Paramount Vantage), the tense recounting of the frantic search for Pearl, played here by Dan Futterman, not only holds your interest, but emerges as a testament to fortitude in the face of tragedy. The story is told mainly from the perspective of his pregnant wife, Mariane (Angelina Jolie), a journalist on whose memoir, "A Mighty Heart: The Brave Life and Death of My Husband Danny Pearl," the film is based.

With his on-location shooting (India as well as Pakistan), director Michael Winterbottom superbly captures the chaos and tumult of Karachi.

Near the film's start, Danny, the South Asia bureau chief for the paper, seeks expert advice on the advisability of meeting a man with whom he has only corresponded via e-mail in the hope of gathering information on would-be "shoe bomber" Richard Reid in the days after Sept. 11, 2001. He's assured that as long as the assignation takes place in a public place he should be safe.

On the appointed night, he takes a cab to the Village Restaurant, dismisses his driver, but later (we don't see quite how) he is persuaded to enter a car and driven off to his fate.

When he fails to show for the dinner party Mariane is hosting for their friends, it is clear something has gone terribly awry, and hasty calls are made to the American embassy, starting a manhunt that will soon involve the Pakistani authorities, the CIA and Danny's co-workers.

Mariane's support group includes Indian friend and journalist Asra Nomani (Archie Panjabi), at whose house she and Danny had been living; a Pakistani counterterrorism expert known only as Captain (Irrfan Khan); Wall Street Journal colleagues John Bussey (Denis O'Hare) and Steve LeVine (Gary Wilmes); and American security chief Randall Bennett (Will Patton).

The presumed motive for the abduction by the jihadis, we learn, is the perpetrators' notion that Danny was a CIA operative.

Acting in a naturalistic style without undue histrionics (except for one searing outpouring of grief), Jolie deftly submerges her own persona, capturing both Mariane's physical appearance and French accent.

What stays with you is the remarkable fact that Mariane refuses to succumb to bitterness or hatred, making "A Mighty Heart" an inspiring portrait of courage (both hers and Danny's), resilience under adversity and the triumph of the human spirit.

The film contains several uses of the f-word under duress, and a few other crude or crass words, fleeting newsreel footage of bombings and some dead bodies including a grim morgue image, a discreet torture scene, a brief nongraphic bedroom scene and a verbal description of Pearl's gruesome death. (A-III, R)

1408
Adaptation of a Stephen King short story (MGM/Dimension) has Mike Enslin (John Cusack), the writer of guides to occult phenomena, spending a genuinely frightening night in a haunted Manhattan hotel room during which he must confront a past tragedy and his skepticism about God, the afterlife and anything remotely otherworldly. Swedish director Mikael Hafstrom assaults the senses with a barrage of well-executed special effects, but this elaborate, discomfiting ghost tale -- part horror story and part supernatural thriller -- exploits the suffering of a child and ultimately undercuts itself with too many twists. Countless violent and morbid images and references, including many to suicide, frequent crude and profane language, and some sexual references. (A-III, PG-13)

DOA: Dead or Alive
Mindless but bloodless action movie (Dimension), based on a video-game series, pitting four bikini-clad young women (Devon Aoki, Jaime Pressly, Holly Valance and Sarah Carter) and others in an "ultimate fighter" tournament where athletes battle not to the death, but to the "knocked-out," while the master of ceremonies (Eric Roberts) has a secret agenda. Hong Kong action-movie director Corey Yuen fills the movie with wire-work stunts in which martial artists take superhuman leaps, and no one really gets hurt except for the bad guy. A few instances of crude language, frequent crass language, a couple instances of mild profanity, brief partial nudity, much skimpy costuming, crude humor, a morning-after bedroom scene and much action violence including explosions. (A-III, PG-13)

Harry Forbes is director of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops' Office for Film & Broadcasting. More reviews are available online at: www.usccb.org/movies.