Though there are countless dramas of Jewish people hiding in Europe during World War II, The Invisibles focuses on a select group that many (including myself) may not know about. At one point in 1943, Joseph Goebbels famously declared the Nazi capital of Berlin completely free of Jews. But at the end of the war, …
Georg Elser (Christian Friedel), a small town carpenter and musician, spends his time being a ladies’ man and flirting with married women at the beer hall where he plays accordion in the evenings. Local unionists and communists keep the gatherings lively, but when the Nazis come to town, things get tense. Not particularly a religious …
13 Minutes (Elser – Er hätte die Welt verändert) Read More »
Based on Diane Ackerman’s book, the story revolves around the titular character, a woman named Antonina Zabinski (Jessica Chastain). She is sort of an animal whisperer at the Warsaw Zoo, where she helps her zookeeper husband Jan (Johan Heldenbergh) in the daily tasks of managing a zoo. As you see her ride her bike through …
When Zev Guttman (Christopher Plummer) stumbles from his bed in an assisted living facility, calling for his dead wife, Ruth, there is little to suggest that this fragile old man would be capable of caring for himself. Clearly suffering from dementia, Zev requires frequent redirection and often needs the basics of his situation explained. When …
All along I’ve been thinking that Defiance is an insufficient name for a film about surviving the Holocaust. It’s too nondescript, too generic–the movie could be about anything, really. Why not give it a title that hints at the gravity of the film? And then I thought about the movie as I drove to work …
North Face promises—and delivers—all the token movie-poster exclamations: Romance! Adventure! Danger! Death! And, yes, even Nazis! Based a true story, North Face tells the tale of two Germans and two Austrians who attempt to scale the Eiger North Face in the Alps in 1936. The North Face, one of the last unconquered feats in the …
When I was 16, I became obsessed with classic Hollywood films, which sprung forth from a summer vacation reading and viewing of Gone With the Wind. I hopped from director to actor to genre, absorbing all I could find on particular people or subjects. Notorious combined three of my favorites: Ingrid Bergman, Cary Grant, and …
When I had heard that The Book Thief was being made into a movie, I pitied the director who would be faced with the challenge of adapting such a lovely book to the big screen. Markus Zusak’s novel, about a German girl in Nazi Germany is easily one of my top five books of the …
In a very interesting and striking promotional stunt for a movie, The Book Thief’s marketers from Fox paid for a two-page ad campaign of no words, no images… nothing. In fact, it must have been alarming for readers of the The New York Times to open their morning paper and see pages 9 and 10 …
Perhaps showing what a timeless classic it is, Casablanca has provoked different reactions in me depending on when in my life I saw the film. I first watched it as a teenager when I was in the throes of my classic-Hollywood phase. Sure, I thought it was a good film (after all, Ingrid Bergman was …