Film Reviews

 GO GIULIANI TIME In case you were wondering, Rudy Giuliani has always had a bad comb-over. But according to a new agitprop documentary by Kevin Keating, that’s the least of “Fool-iani” ’s many cover-ups. Relying heavily on testimony from Wayne Barrett, The Village Voice’s resident expert on one of New York’s most antagonistic mayors, Giuliani Time energetically deflates one trumpeted myth after another about Giuliani’s success at turning the city around from its doldrums in the 1970s. Sworn enemies like former Mayors David Dinkins and Ed Koch (who places Giuliani somewhere between Caligula and Pinochet) gleefully recount that crime was down in the city before Giuliani’s fabled crackdown, while advocates for the homeless argue that the economic boom accomplished on Giuliani’s watch came at the expense of civil liberties and off the backs of the poor, who were dumped from welfare rolls with no preparation for decent work, while street artists were forced out of the city. I’ll buy the contention that Giuliani would make an even worse president than George Bush. But Keating’s film is such a thorough­going hatchet job — Barrett can’t even give the mayor credit for his early successes busting the Mafia without sneering at his family’s (not his) mob connections — that it loses credibility as a rounded portrait of a complex man. At the end, Barrett appears incredulous that Giuliani was widely admired for conducting himself like a hero after 9/11. On that occasion, he did. (Westside Pavilion) (Ella Taylor)