Cheat Sheet

By RICHARD CORLISS, Lev Grossman, James Poniewozik

UNAVOIDABLE

THE LAST KING OF SCOTLAND On DVD April 17

Everyone saw Forest Whitaker win the Oscar for Best Actor, but few saw his performance onscreen. Now, at home, viewers can see what all the fuss was about. They'll find that Idi Amin Dada, the Ugandan dictator Whitaker plays with charismatic power, is a secondary character in this fact-based drama about a Scottish doctor (James McAvoy) testing his scruples against the seductions of power. The film replays the old Graham Greene trope of Europeans acting out their fascination and guilt amid Third World chaos. In this case, that makes for a tepid and implausible sideshow to the immense horror of Amin's genocidal rule.

UNNECESSARY

'TIL DEATH DO US PART Court TV, Mondays, 10 p.m.

A married couple falls out of love--and one spouse gets killed--in each of these dramatized deadpan docufarces, with bad-taste maven John Waters hosting as the "Groom Reaper." The tacky milieu, high emoting and lowlife venality may trick you into thinking you're watching one of those good-bad John Waters movies. Alas, you're just watching John Waters watching a not-so-good TV show. Sorry.

UNMISSABLE

NOTES ON A SCANDAL On DVD April 17

Star quality, or startling beauty, can be an affront to the rest of us, stirring envy and rancor. That may be what drives Barbara (Judi Dench), a drab, old teacher at a London school, to latch and leech onto a new instructor, the stunning, vulnerable, morally floundering Sheba (Cate Blanchett). Sad meets bad--or is it mad?--in this knowing, brutal comedy. Dench has maybe her best-ever movie role: a queen bee who deals in the honey of treachery.

CATCHING UP WITH ... Con Air

"A good lawyer makes you believe the truth," says attorney Doug Rich (Eddie Izzard) in THE RICHES, FX, MONDAYS, 10 P.M. E.T. "A great lawyer makes you believe the lie." Doug knows whereof he speaks because he's not actually a lawyer. And he is not actually Doug Rich. He is con man Wayne Malloy, who with wife Dahlia (Minnie Driver) and kids have taken over the swellegant life of a man who died en route to his new suburban home. As Wayne tries to scam his way through corporate law, Dahlia adjusts to straight suburban life and the kids try to fit in at private school, the series shows that social mobility isn't as easy as advertised in America and that identity is less a constant than a performance. Everybody feels like a fraud, says The Riches. Some of us just happen to earn a bigger prize for it.

WHEN A CROCODILE EATS THE SUN By Peter Godwin 344 pages

REVIEW Kicked Out Of Africa

Jambanja is a word the Shona people of Zimbabwe use to mean "to turn everything upside down, to cause violent confusion." Of late it has come to refer to the practice of running white Zimbabwean farmers, many of whom have been there for generations, off their land. Peter Godwin, a white Zimbabwean, has observed quite a bit of jambanja at uncomfortably close quarters, and he has meticulously recorded his outraged, torchlit impressions in this remarkable memoir: the harassment, the chanting mobs, the beating of the elderly, the pointless destruction of food-bearing land, all the smashed crockery of a peaceful, genteel microculture destroyed by greed and ignorance with the blessing of Zimbabwe's monstrous President Robert Mugabe.

But no African story is simple, and the current violence has its roots in older injustices. "Colonialism lasted just long enough to destroy much of Africa's indigenous cultures and traditions," Godwin observes, "but not long enough to leave behind a durable replacement." Godwin's own story lends another layer of historical irony. In 2001 he learned that his father was not, as he had always believed, an English immigrant. He was a Polish Jew who had fled the Holocaust. "Being a white here," Godwin's father observes, dismayed at the rising chaos, "is starting to feel a bit like being a Jew in Poland in 1939."