David D'Arcy wears multiple hats as a critic for Screen International, journalist for The National, and programmer for the Haifa International Film Festival in Israel. He always has something interesting to say, as viewers of Art of the Steal will discover (see below). Here are his TIFF doc picks:

Cleanflix - Scratch the heartland, and who knows what you'll find.  I'm fascinated by the premise of Cleanflix. In Utah, in the shadow of ardently-PC Sundance, some entrepreneurial young Mormons deliver their religiously acceptable version of Hollywood movies to meet demand from local youth by slicing out objectionable footage and distributing the bowdlerized films. Not even the Catholic Legion of Decency tried that gambit. Seems logical - an enterprising strategy to serve a higher power, and serve the civil religion of profit. It also sounds like a typical American dilemma - can you break the law and mutilate someone else's intellectual property to shield your customers from sin? Earnest religion faces off against Big Entertainment.

How to Fold A Flag (pictured) - Michael Tucker and Petra Epperlein were in Toronto in September 2004 with Gunner Palace, a candid look inside one US Army unit performing the Sisyphean task of patrolling and searching for insurgents in Baghdad, before the most violent days of the US occupation.  Tucker and Epperlein, to their credit, have stayed with their subject - The Prisoner or How I Tried to Kill Tony Blair (2006), chronicling the confinement and mistreatment in Abu Ghraib of a wrongly arrested Iraqi, and Bulletproof Salesman (2008) profiling an arms dealer selling bombproof vehicles that the Defense Department won't buy for regular troops in Iraq. Now they've followed up on a Gunner Palace soldier's prediction that no one in the US will care much for grunts who fought in Iraq, given the minimal sacrifice by the general population. Was he right?  Could be a reality check on the rhetoric of the Bush administration.

Snowblind - Vikram Jayanti's new film about a legally-blind woman who is determined to race the Iditarod dogsled marathon across Alaska for a third time sounds like a motivational tale posing as screwball/suspense road movie - only there's no road. And you thought Sarah Palin was unusual. Be prepared for an industry hair-pull over the remake rights.

The Art of the Steal - Full disclosure - I was interviewed for this film in early 2008. I'm told that I am in it. I also wrote and narrated a film on this subject for the BBC in the early 1990s. (See recent articles about the unique Barnes Foundation outside Philadelphia in the LA Times, The American Prospect, and ArtNet). The Barnes Foundation's fate is an art-world twist on the perennial tale of the killing of the goose that laid the golden egg - an extraordinary art collection, greedy Pennsylvania politicians, power-seeking philanthropists, and a twenty-year scramble (as tawdry as *Chinatown*) to control and exploit what was founded as a contemplative place to study paintings. If you love the work of Cezanne, Matisse and Picasso, you'll worry about what's been called the worst art theft since World War II.