HBO (Wed. Sept. 13, 9 P.M. ET)
A+
Lee Grant has always been one heck of an actress; Battered confirms that she is one heck of a filmmaker too. (She won an Oscar for producing the 1986 documentary Down and Out in America.) The program investigates its subject thoroughly, vividly and movingly. Grant, who both co-produced and directed, persuades victims and victimizers to open up with amazing candor, and her handling of them is never lurid or sensational. Her narration says, shockingly, that 6 million American women will be battered this year, and 1,500 of them will die from their injuries. But it is not the statistics alone that disturb here. Pictures of a little girl putting flowers on her mother's coffin will test both your heart and your supply of tears.
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