In satires like Family Viewing and Speaking Parts, Canadian wunderkind Atom Egoyan pinpointed a pervasive image fetishism in our televisual culture. "Egoyan refuses to distinguish between art film, home movies, and pornography. Technology...circuits desire back to the primal scene....fathers and sons struggle for control over images-who produces them and who assigns their value" (Amy Taubin, Village Voice). The Adjuster concerns one Noah Render (Elias Koteas), insurance adjuster extraordinaire, who, in his curiosity and compassion, adjusts much more than the insurance of the victims of natural disasters. His wife Hera (Arsinée Khanjian) is another sort of assessor, a film censor who brings the good parts home. Bubba and Mimi are a rich couple who plan to use Noah and Hera's model suburban house as the site of one of their compulsive home-movie/performances. Each in his way is obsessed with viewing, with sex, with sex as viewing and vice versa. But the sex is all off-screen, true to Egoyan's playful intellectualism, which creates a mood of mystery and disorientation before bringing everything full circle. (One of the year's ten best -Taubin.)