One fears the sort of journalistically dubious, polemical documentary made popular by Nick Broomfield ("Biggie and Tupac") and Michael Moore ("Bowling for Columbine").

"Mixed Blessings," which appears tonight on PBS, is a presentation of "Wide Angle, which often puts its name on more polemical documentaries; the argument of this one is something like "times change.

Just ask that master political operative Karl Rove, the Bush presidential adviser who is attacked in the polemical documentary "Bush's Brain."

The writers and directors of this openly polemical but also sobering documentary - Sut Jhally, a professor of communications at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and Jeremy Earp, a doctoral candidate there - suggest that the reality is much bigger and even more disturbing.

More recently Al Gore reminded us that polemical documentaries, like ecosystems, live and die by them.

Directed by Francine Cavanaugh, A. Mark Liiv and Adams Wood Not rated, 96 minutes A lot of old-fashioned Bay Area activism is on display in "Boom: The Sound of Eviction," a polemical documentary on the housing crisis that visited San Francisco as a result of the dot-com boom of the 1990's.

"In the Name of the Emperor," which opens today at Film Forum, is a polemical documentary that addresses the horrors and injustices it portrays in a crisp, matter-of-fact tone.

The Story of Stuff is a short polemical animated documentary about the lifecycle of material goods.

In its grim perspective on the Soviet future and in the wary official reaction, "Taxi Blues" recalls the other cinema sensation of the year, Stanislav Govorukhin's "This is No Way to Live," a polemical documentary that raises the question of a Nuremberg-style trial for the Communist Party.