Shooting Dogs is a better movie than Hotel Rwanda: faint praise, perhaps, but it's worth pointing out that where Terry George's crowd-pleaser-about-genocide jerry-rigged its subject matter into something determinedly edifying and uplifting, Shooting Dogs is shot through with frustration and sadness.

The film is set at the beginning of the conflict between the Hutus and the Tutsis, unfolding largely on the premises of the École Technique Officielle, a sprawling secondary school in Kigali that opened its doors to hundreds of Tutsi refugees during the massacre. Like Hotel Rwanda, the film is only loosely based on a true story. The school exists, but its two most heroic onscreen employees -- the popular young British teacher Joe Connor (Hugh Dancy) and the benevolent old priest Father Christopher (John Hurt) -- are clearly fictional characters, and stock ones at that: Joe is the wide-eyed naïf whose idealism gets squished; Papa Chris the long-suffering sage whose kindness is tempered by a weary fatalism.

It'd feel heavy-handed (black suffering glimpsed through the eyes of teary, resolute whites) but Michael Caton-Jones -- who has since earned a permanent place in bad-movie history with Basic Instinct 2 -- directs with admirable sharpness (the violence is graphic) and sensitivity (nothing is lingered over).

Email us at: LETTERS@EYEWEEKLY.COM or send your questions to EYEWEEKLY.COM
625 Church St, 6th Floor, Toronto M4Y 2G1