Eric Chaikin

Noah Melville, a popular college professor and confirmed sensualist, provides scholarships for gorgeous college girls through an escort service, whose satisfied clients include the chairman of the school board, the chief of police, and even the mayor of their idyllic college town. When a young woman's dead body is found near the campus, the moralistic new detective in town, Patrick Kelly, investigates, leading him to the professor. Exposed, Noah must leave his devoted wife and daughter and flee the law. Kelly, for his own reasons, takes the law into his own hands to bring Noah to justice. Their deadly showdown has a surprising result.

Unlike any other opera, the so-called Beggar's Opera is not just one composition, but a lineage of adapted compositions, beginning with the original hugely successful 1728 political satire written by Englishman John Gay. Composers and writers have penned variations on it ever since. The most famous of these was A Threepenny Opera by Bertholt Brecht and Kurt Weill. Some things these compositions share in common is their setting among the poor and criminal classes, and the roguish character Macheath. This production is based on an adaptation of Gay's original by Vaclav Havel the freedom-fighter, writer and philosopher who became the first (and only) president of the united post-communist country of Czechoslovakia, and it retains many traces of its theatrical origins. Film reviewers were not too tolerant of what they called "slavish adherence" to the noted Czech writer's stage production, but theater, philosophy and history buffs may feel otherwise.

The classic board game, Scrabble, has been popular for decades. In addition, there are fanatics who devote heart and soul to this game to the expense of everything else. This film profiles a group of these enthusiasts as they converge for a Scrabble convention where the word game is almost a bloodsport.

A lurid tale of lawsuits and lawyers and America's obsession with both.