Tragedy

"Bullhead" is an intense, shattering film, a confident and accomplished, punch-in-the-gut debut by Belgian writer-director Michael R. Roskam that starts out like a thriller and turns into a disturbing tragedy in an unlikely and unexpected key. "Bullhead," one of the five contenders for this year's Oscar for foreign-language film, gets much of its ferocity, and its unlooked-for tragic implications, from the compelling performance of Matthias Schoenaerts...

KABUL, Afghanistan - In many ways, the two young soldiers were not so different from each other. Each was tough-minded and physically powerful. Each worked hard to win a place in an elite military unit, and spoke with pride of serving his country. They were 25 years old, these two: one newly married, the other planning a wedding this year. Their upbringings were as disparate as their homelands were distant, but religious faith was entwined with the family lives of both.

First of two parts After midnight on a cool September morning three years ago, Khristina Henry and her boyfriend stepped out of the El Dorado Bowling Alley near LAX. Nearby, a group of about 20 young men stared hard as the pair of 17-year-olds walked to their car. Two men peeled off from the group and approached. "What you got? What you got?" one of them demanded, as he pulled a stainless steel handgun from his pocket and cocked it in the boy's face. "I will kill you right now," the gunman threatened.

Congratulations on the magnificent Travel section ["Sinking of the Titanic"] I had the pleasure of reading April 15. And the photo on the cover pretty much captures the poignancy of the Titanic tragedy. Good job. Bob McLaughlin San Simeon Access for the disabled I read with interest Catharine Hamm's article "Disabled-Accessibility Is Hit or Miss" [On the Spot, April 15]. My spouse is disabled, and we share the same difficulties as Susan St. Laurent, the disabled traveler in her article, although on a different level.

Tim, a New York City firefighter, knew instinctively when his co-worker and best friend, Terry, cocked his head and wordlessly indicated that he was heading into a flaming World Trade Center tower that it was the last time he would see him. Ling, who was burned in the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, could do little for months afterward but sit on the couch and watch "Murder, She Wrote. " Basically, "here's this little old lady who somehow figures everything out," she says was her reaction to the show, and it brought her a strange comfort.

I like to help people. Tell me what's wrong, and I'll take on anyone and anything to try to make it better. Then news came about a boy, and everything changed. A family in our community lost their teenage son when he fell from the fifth-floor balcony of his apartment at college. He was smart, kind and gregarious - a boy with a twin brother, a kid brother and loving parents. One night he leaned too far over his balcony in the darkness and plummeted to his death. Everyone wanted to know the particulars - whether he was drunk or did it purposefully, who was with him, whether it could have been prevented.

Away from the spotlight of a presidential visit and the glare of national publicity, this rural town of 5,000 in northeast Alabama nursed its tragedy. The walls of the Rainsville Civic Center were blown out. Across the street, the Huddle House, a popular eatery, and the local credit union, were wiped out. Rainsville is part of DeKalb County, which is reporting 32 deaths from the tornadoes that have turned Alabama in the worst-hit state by the deadliest storms in decades. The county ranks right behind Tuscaloosa, where there are 38 confirmed deaths of the state's 210 reported deaths so far. President Obama visited Tuscaloosa on Friday.

The Tragedy of Arthur A Novel Arthur Phillips Random House: 368 pp., $26 First, the MacGuffin: Arthur Phillips' fifth novel, "The Tragedy of Arthur," is built around a full-length, five-act Shakespeare play, "The Most Excellent and Tragical Historie of Arthur, King of Britain," composed (or, in the conceit of the novel, "discovered") by Phillips himself. It's a bravura strategy, relying on his ability to inhabit the rhythms, "the feeling of Shakespeare … it's like a fingerprint.

David Ehrenstein sees "Brokeback Mountain" as just "a well-closeted romance" (Opinion, Feb. 1), missing its compelling demonstration of the tragedy of the closet. That may not be particularly controversial to him, but it is to many. He forgets that the political movement whose success made the film possible was also led by "chameleons," as gays were taught to be. ROGER JANEWAY Los Angeles

LAS VEGAS -- In what authorities are calling the first confirmed suicide at the new Hoover Dam bypass bridge, a 60-year-old San Jose woman leaped to her death from the 900-foot-high span Saturday. Federal police had attempted to convince her to step back from a precipice along the pedestrian walkway, but to no avail. The victim was identified as Patricia Oakley of San Jose, U.S. Bureau of Reclamation spokeswoman Rose Davis said Tuesday. Oakley's body was found downstream Sunday by Colorado River kayakers.

A police officer was shot and killed at an Austin, Texas, Wal-Mart in the early hours of Good Friday , authorities said. Austin Police Chief Art Acevedo told The Times that Officer Jaime Padron responded to a call about a drunk man inside the store at about 2:20 a.m. local time. Padron, 40, didn't even have a chance to draw his weapon before he was shot in the throat and chest, Acevedo said. "The suspect produced a semi-automatic pistol and shot the officer at point-blank range," Acevedo said.

Julian Fellowes recalls his first Titanic moment, decades before a young Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet climbed onto James Cameron's set. "It haunted me," he says of a childhood viewing of "A Night to Remember," the 1958 British film about the ocean liner's crash into an iceberg and the ensuing race for the lifeboats. "Somehow the disaster of the Titanic embraces so much of that world -- high and low, working men and aristocrats, entrepreneurs and movie stars, immigrants hoping to start a new life in America.

Young adult novelists are increasingly tackling darker subjects: kidnappings, drugs, rape. But few have delved into so many dark subjects as novelist Thane Rosenbaum, who ventures into YA territory with his latest, "The Stranger Within Sarah Stein," a novel revolving around divorce, Sept. 11, homelessness and the Holocaust. What might be most odd about this combination of subjects is that the book isn't glum at all. Told through the eyes of the perky, bike-riding 12-year-old Sarah Stein, the daughter of a candy-making mother and an artist-painter father, it works as more of a fantasy than as a dark rumination on tragedy.

The case of George Zimmerman, who shot and killed black teenager Trayvon Martin, continues to reverberate beyond Sanford, Fla., with new investigations, nationwide demonstrations and concerns expressed by President Obama on Friday. Trayvon, 17, was shot by Zimmerman, a Latino, on Feb. 26. Zimmerman told Sanford police that he acted in self-defense and police decided not to charge the 28-year-old neighborhood watch volunteer. Since that decision, the police chief has temporarily stepped aside and protests have roiled the Florida city with a turbulent racial past.

Even after decades of well-documented murder and plunder, even after the International Criminal Court indicted him and a U.S. president dispatched a special forces team to help catch him, African warlord Joseph Kony remained largely obscure to the West. That changed with startling swiftness this week, with the viral proliferation of a smoothly produced 29-minute video, "Kony 2012," that calculatedly taps the power of social media in an effort to make the fugitive leader of the Lord's Resistance Army a figure of global infamy.

There used to be two places on curvy Claremont Drive that Renee Tarzia called home — the house she grew up in and the low-slung ranch house across the street, where "second mom" Elizabeth Torres lived for 40 years. Both homes were reduced to ashes in the gas explosion and fire that ravaged this sleepy San Francisco suburb nearly a week ago. On Tuesday, word finally came from the San Mateo County coroner that Torres, 81, had been identified as the fourth person killed in the disaster.

The four Oscar-nominated short documentaries being released in theaters this weekend are a mostly somber bunch, traversing the globe to find pockets of tolerable humanity in the kind of grim international dispatches you might expect to find in an episode of "Frontline/World. " (Only nominee "God Is the Bigger Elvis" isn't part of this theatrical release.) James Spione's "Incident in New Baghdad" is little more than a straightforward interview with U.S. Army Spec. Ethan McCord, but it's a gripping, grueling tale.

"Bullhead" is an intense, shattering film, a confident and accomplished, punch-in-the-gut debut by Belgian writer-director Michael R. Roskam that starts out like a thriller and turns into a disturbing tragedy in an unlikely and unexpected key. "Bullhead," one of the five contenders for this year's Oscar for foreign-language film, gets much of its ferocity, and its unlooked-for tragic implications, from the compelling performance of Matthias Schoenaerts...