The "society of fear" of post-9/11 America is the subject of Strange Culture, San Francisco native Lynn Hershman Leeson's account of the Kafkaesque spiral experienced by college professor and conceptual artist Steve Kurtz after his wife died in her sleep in 2004 and his scientific studies were used to bring bio-terrorist charges against him. A mix of news footage and reenactment (with Thomas Jay Ryan and Leeson axiom Tilda Swinton appearing both as the real-life married couple and as themselves), with Kurtz himself commenting on his ordeal, the film is as much of a multimedia project as its subject's exhibits (the man was prepping an interactive project for the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art at the time of his wife's demise), with its engaged outrage tempered with a lightness of touch that rescues the film from being a picture of slogans.  Fernando F. Croce