Greenwald's star is probably a man named Weldon Nicholson, for 17 years a member of Wal-Mart management whose primary job was to travel from store to store, forcing out employees suspected of being actual or potential union organizers. Nicholson also testifies to other now-notorious management practices, most of them never written down in training manuals: forcing store employees to work unpaid overtime; hiring undocumented immigrants as overnight cleaning crews at sub-minimum wage; making cash payments to local zoning and planning officials; directing underpaid workers to Medicaid, food stamps, childhood nutrition programs and other forms of government assistance.

We also meet the owners of longtime local businesses destroyed by Wal-Mart -- places like Esry's Grocery, of Hamilton, Mo., and H&H Hardware, of Middlefield, Ohio -- African-American and female employees who worked eagerly and hard for years at poverty wages and were told there was no place for them in management; customers victimized by crimes in the stores' vast, unpoliced parking lots; and a former global-services manager who says he was fired for reporting the truth about the chain's factories in Latin America. What makes the movie so powerful is the totality of the portrait, both in its details and its sweep. Most of these people are entirely unexceptional Americans from the working class or lower-middle class, believers in flag and country and God and capitalism, not left-wing activists or academics with some theoretical critique. Most of them believed in Wal-Mart, too, and were genuinely horrified to learn that its low prices depended on enforced poverty, whether theirs or somebody else's.

For me, the crippling moment arrives when Greenwald takes his cameras to a factory in China, where workers toil 14 hours a day, seven days a week, to make toys for Wal-Mart. They're paid roughly 30 to 40 cents an hour (with rent for the factory's dormitory, with its triple-decker bunk beds, deducted) and perhaps an economist could convince me that's a decent wage in that context. But for me these workers and their painful, hopeful stories recalled the righteous anger of Chapter 4 of Marx's "Capital," with its descriptions of the Industrial Revolution's workday that began long before dawn and went deep into the night, of women locked in sweatshops and 8-year-old children fed their lunches inside the machinery. I started anxiously reading the labels on my shirts and asking myself questions: Where did I buy this -- I'm hoping the answer is the Salvation Army -- and where did it come from before that? And am I really willing to buy a shirt at a price that would pay the person who made it a decent wage?

Greenwald's film ends with a couple of genuinely inspiring case histories of very different American towns whose people have come together to keep out Wal-Mart. But it never quite asks its audience the question I just asked, nor does it acknowledge that the vast service-sector economy that is now the bedrock of American life depends on the wide range of low-price commodities available at places like Wal-Mart, Target, Kmart, Ikea and so on. Some of those stores are better than others, and the evidence here and elsewhere suggests that Wal-Mart is a particularly insidious form of capitalist carcinoma. But Wal-Mart did not create the current stage of global capitalism. We've all played our roles in accepting and maintaining it, and if we want it to change, keeping the big box out of our own neighborhood isn't really enough.

"Wal-Mart: The High Cost of Low Price" opens Nov. 4 in New York and Los Angeles, Nov. 23 in San Francisco and Berkeley, Calif., Dec. 2 in Minneapolis, and Dec. 9 in Chicago, La Jolla, Calif., and Royal Oak, Mich., with more cities to follow. DVDs and VHS tapes are available from the Web site, and more than 3,000 screening parties will be held all over the country, beginning Nov. 13.

"Gay Sex in the 70s": An age of revolution -- and also mustaches
One of the interviewees in Joseph Lovett's "Gay Sex in the 70s," an African-American photographer in his mid-50s, is asked by the director whether it was true that gay New York in that legendary decade experienced a period of sexual indulgence unknown since the late Roman Empire. It's been a sober conversation to that point, and you can see the guy processing the question for a second, wondering whether he's supposed to say something diplomatic. Then a slow smile creeps across his face -- and it's not a sad or rueful smile or anything like that, either -- and you know what the answer is.

Lovett's film is a finely balanced and loving work of history, which never tries to sugarcoat elements of the explosion of gay sexuality three decades ago that may seem excessive or disturbing to some contemporary viewers. He's well aware that some people, both gay and otherwise, view the sexual revolution of the 1970s and the deadly epidemic that followed through a moral lens, and you can read his movie that way if you insist on it.

But as a veteran producer and director of TV specials and documentaries about AIDS and other deadly disorders, Lovett says, "I've done my share of equating sex with death." What he's after here, instead, is recapturing what he calls "a time of exploration, a time of surprise," which not only galvanized a nascent gay community -- no such thing really existed before the Stonewall uprising in 1969 -- but transformed all Americans' ideas about sex and sexuality, regardless of our gender or those of our preferred partners.

Mixing contemporary interviews with the era's survivors -- sadly, that's the only word to use -- and often startling file footage and still images, Lovett distills the slightly dangerous vibe of an almost unrecognizable New York. In a city plagued by crime, suburban emigration and a crumbling infrastructure, young gay men poured in by the thousands after 1969, claiming its abandoned spaces as zones of sexual adventure. Gay bars bloomed in every neighborhood, empty health clubs were reborn as the now-legendary bathhouses. The decrepit Hudson River piers and the tractor-trailers parked overnight in the meat-packing district became well-known cruising spots -- although maybe it's euphemistic to refer to sex in complete darkness with someone you can't see as "cruising."

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