(2006, USA, 113 minutes. Now in theaters)

Review by Carl Schroeder

What does the United States get right, and what does it not? Americans should be willing to ask themselves this question; God knows the rest of the world does. The riveting new documentary film Sicko makes gut-wrenchingly clear that Americans have over-protected their rights to pursue private enterprise at the expense of the health of families and friends.

The overall health care of Americans ranks 37th in the world, only slightly ahead of Slovenia and Cuba. Why? Because we’re the only developed nation that refuses a national health care system. Instead we place the wellbeing of our men, women, and children in the hands of for-profit insurance companies. We learn that the average baby now has a better chance of surviving in any Latin American country than in the United States. That’s right. Americans have the highest infant mortality rate of any nation in the Western Hemisphere, far worse than Canada.

by Jeremy Narby
Review by Cate Montana

In 1985 Jeremy Narby was an eager, 25 year-old anthropology student doing fieldwork for his doctorate in anthropology from Stanford University. For two years he lived amongst the Ashaninca natives in the community of Quirishari in the Peruvian Amazon’s Pichis Valley. "My training had lead me to expect that people would tell tall stories," relates Narby. "I thought my job as an anthropologist was to discover what they really thought, like some kind of private detective."