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RESISTANCE: THEY FOUGHT BACK — Paula Apsell Interview

April 12, 2024 By Leave a Comment

RESISTANCE: THEY FOUGHT BACK — Paula Apsell Interview

Click here to listen to the interview. When I spoke with Paula Apsell via Zoom on April 10, 2024, I couldn’t help but start by thanking her for making a film that portrayed Jews in the Holocaust as something other than passive victims. That narrative is all too familiar, and for too many years, was… Read More »

Tagged With: Amidah, anti-Semitism, Bela Hazan, concentration camps, crematoria, ESCAPE FROM SOBIBOR, gas chambers, geoarcheology, Greece, Holocaust, Lisa Goodfellow, Marcel Nadjari, Michael Berenbaum, Nazi, resistance, Richard Freund, Sephardim, Sonderkommando, white supremacists, World War II

ONE LIFE — James Hawes Interview

March 17, 2024 By 1 Comment

ONE LIFE — James Hawes Interview

Click here to listen to the interview. ONE LIFE had been in pre-production for many years before finally premiering now in 2024. When I spoke with its director, James Hawes, via Zoom on March 13, 2024, I couldn’t help but ask him if he thought there was some sort of synchronicity at work with the… Read More »

Tagged With: based on a true story, Czechoslovakia, Nazi, Nicholas Winton, Refugee, World War II

OPPENHEIMER

August 7, 2023 By 1 Comment

OPPENHEIMER

Christopher Nolan’s OPPENHEIMER demands that we consider the father of the atomic bomb’s life in context, the which he does with stunning clarity considering the paradoxes the film considers. Like the quantum world revealed by the new physics that Oppenheimer (Cillian Murphy) brought to the United States between the world wars, things can work even… Read More »

Tagged With: Albert Einstein, atomic bomb, based on a true story, communist witch hunt, Gray Board, Hiroshima, J. Robert Oppenheimer, Manhattan Project, new physics, paradox, relativity, senate hearing, Trinity, World War II

DARA OF JASENOVAC

February 16, 2021 By Leave a Comment

DARA OF JASENOVAC

DARA OF JASENOVAC is a brutal film about a lesser-known part of the Holocaust. Based on the testimony of survivors, it expounds on Jasenovac, the only Fascist concentration camps in World War II that were not run by the Nazis themselves. Instead, inspired and advised by the Nazis, they were established by the Roman Catholic… Read More »

Tagged With: based on a true story, concentration camp, Croatia, genocide, Holocaust, murder, sadism, Serbia, World War II

RED JOAN

April 28, 2019 By Leave a Comment

RED JOAN

Science is pure.  A hypothesis is either true or it isn’t and the scientific method can be used, unfailingly, to prove it.  Politics and human emotions are another story, as we learn in RED JOAN, a drama of that most potent mixture, love and politics. Based on a true story, it considers questions of loyalty… Read More »

Tagged With: atomic secrets, based on a true story, Cambridge, espionage, Official Secrets Act, World War II

1945

May 19, 2018 By Leave a Comment

1945

The Oscars™ are not always the most reliable barometer of cinematic greatness.  Let us remember the year that KRAMER VS. KRAMER beat out APOCALYPSE NOW. This year’s oversights were less egregious, and I am delighted that A FANTASTIC WOMAN won the Best Foreign Language prize.  I am still miffed, though, that 1945 wasn’t even nominated… Read More »

Tagged With: 1945, anti-Semitism, black and white, Hungary, occupation, World War II

DUNKIRK

July 22, 2017 By 3 Comments

DUNKIRK

Spinoza once opined that you couldn’t use words to describe God, because by choosing any one or several, you would be eliminating the infinite nature of the deity. That essential inadequacy of words drives much of Christopher Nolan’s stunning film, DUNKIRK. Stunning in many sense of that word. Hence, we don’t learn that Tommy (Fionn… Read More »

Tagged With: based on a true story, bombs, dogfight, Dunkirk, English Channel, military history, soldier, tides, World War II

ALLIED

November 23, 2016 By 1 Comment

ALLIED

There is an artistic license that we allow films that sweep us along when their emotional resonance is overpowering. Minor plot points that aren’t resolved, or factual errors.  For an example of the latter, one need look no further than the Letters of Transit, desired by so many in CASABLANCA.  No such thing.  Yet it… Read More »

Tagged With: Casablanca, Nazi, romance, spies, World War II

HACKSAW RIDGE

November 3, 2016 By Leave a Comment

HACKSAW RIDGE

Mel Gibson’s HACKSAW RIDGE begins with a quiet shot looking down (from heaven?) on corpses. They are horrific, with bits missing and gore everywhere.  It’s a moment that will quickly give way to the battle of Okinawa that made them. Bodies ripped by bullets falling to the ground, others engulfed in flames running in panic.… Read More »

Tagged With: based on a true story, basic training, Blue Ridge Mountains, conscientious objector, drill sergeant, first love, Hacksaw Ridge, Okinawa, Pacific Theater, tourniquet, World War II

ANTHROPOID

August 10, 2016 By Leave a Comment

ANTHROPOID

ANTHROPOID is divided into two episodes, one more gut-wrenching than the last as it tells the fact-based story of Czech partisans on what is essentially a suicide mission to assassinate SS General Reinhardt Heydrich, Butcher of Prague, co-planner of the Final Solution, and third in line in the Nazi hierarchy. While the first part is… Read More »

Tagged With: based on a true story, cyanide capsule, Czechoslovakia, Nazi, resistance, torture, World War II

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