Neil LaBute’s “Lakeview Terrace” is a film about a black cop who makes life hell for an interracial couple who move in next door. It will inspire strong reactions among its viewers, including outrage. It is intended to. LaBute often creates painful situations that challenge a character’s sense of decency. This time he does it within the structure of a thriller, but the questions are there all the same.

As with its competitors, Dell’s Inspiron Mini 9 is fitted with Intel’s Atom N270 chip. This pint-sized processor has a surprising amount of muscle. Partnered with 1GB of RAM, it gallops through everyday tasks such as email and the web and uses programs such as Microsoft Office. If you’re in the market for a netbook, the Inspiron Mini should be near the top of your list.

I haven’t been enthusiastic about any office application for some time. They aren’t flashy. They shouldn’t be, really, as it gets in the way of their primary task. That’s why it seems that OpenOffice.org’s 3.0 release candidate is a winner. It doesn’t look radically different. Its new features are its strength, and its extensibility is its future.

For “Heroes,” the writers strike actually came in the nick of time: Just as NBC’s promising sci-fi serial appeared to be careering off course, the work stoppage truncated its second season. Back with new spring in its step, the show continues to feature intriguing characters and stories, but it’s time-hopping shenanigans risk wearing thin.

“Wall-E” was released in the States in June. So why have we had to wait almost three months for it to hit Australian cinemas? It’s an inexcusable delay for a film which is one of the finest - if not the finest - that the geniuses at Pixar have ever produced.

“The Women” isn’t a great movie, but how could it be? Too many characters and too much melodrama for that, and the comedy has to be somewhat muted to make the characters semi-believable. But as a well-crafted, well-written and well-acted entertainment, it drew me in and got its job done.

In some tests the stock Eee Linux distribution was running quite slow and placing far behind Mandriva, Fedora, and Ubuntu, but when it came to the solid-state disk performance Xandros had the lead. Overall though, it appears that Ubuntu 8.10 Alpha 4 had delivered the best performance on the Intel Atom architecture.

I think gOS 3 has some merits. Trying to free some of the Web applications from the browser sometimes makes sense. Adding WINE is also a plus for new Windows switchers. Having MP3 playback and Flash working out of the box is also helpful for newbies. Other than a few minor issues I didn’t have any problems running the system.

This is not a great Coen brothers’ film. Nor is it one of their bewildering excursions off the deep end. It’s funny, sometimes delightful, sometimes a little sad, with dialogue that sounds perfectly logical until you listen a little more carefully and realize all of these people are mad. The movie is only 96 minutes long. That’s long enough for a movie, but this time, I dunno, I thought the end felt like it arrived a little arbitrarily.

I’m not always a fan of two-hour pilots as opening episodes tend to be more expository than anything else. And yes, the premiere of J.J. Abram’s “Fringe” definitely can stay away from such exposition.