Keyword Archive:
Holocaust

Judgment at Nuremburg (1961)

Wednesday, October 18th, 2006
★★★★★

You know, there’s one thing about Americans. We’re not cut out to be occupiers. We’re new at it and we’re not very good at it.

Stanley Kramer’s second courtroom drama starring Spencer Tracy in as many years is mostly an actor’s tour de force, but surprisingly not for the film’s nominal stars, Tracy and Burt Lancaster. Both of these veterans step back and let a handful of others take center screen. The talent pool is so deep in this film that the fifth-billed actor, Maximilian Schell, took home a Best Actor Oscar, the deepest that award has gone into a film’s “bench.”

Judgment at Nuremburg

The film is a heavily fictionalized version of the actual Judges Trial during the Nuremberg Trials after World War II. (more…)

Posted by in Movie Reviews | 2 Comments »

To Be or Not to Be (1983)

Sunday, April 23rd, 2006
★★★★★

If it wasn’t for Jews, fags, and gypsies, there would be no theater.

To Be or Not to Be is sort of an odd duck among Mel Brooks films. Aside from voice-over work and TV guest shots, it’s about his only major role in a film he didn’t write or direct. While long on slapstick, it’s the closest thing to serious that Brooks has been at any point of his career, dealing with the Nazi occupation of Poland and the Holocaust, however obliquely. It also has the most cohesive storyline of any Brooks film since Young Frankenstein.

To Be or Not to Be

(more…)

Posted by in Movie Reviews | 3 Comments »

Everything is Illuminated (2005)

Saturday, April 1st, 2006
★★★★★

I’m not a writer. I mean, I write, but I’m more of a collector, really.

Liev Schreiber exhibits a masterful control of tone and character in this quirky film that shifts seamlessly from quirky ethnic slapstick to something more transcendentally elegiac. Everything is Illuminated also holds its secrets close until the end without cheating the audience at all.

Everything is Illuminated

(more…)

Posted by in Movie Reviews | 2 Comments »

Schindler’s List (1993)

Wednesday, January 18th, 2006
★★★★★

This list… is an absolute good. The list is life. All around its margins lies the gulf.

I first saw Schindler’s List in the theater a few months into its initial run and just days before its sweep at the Oscars. When it was over, I witnessed something I’d not seen much in years of movie going. As the credits rolled and the lights came up, the audience filed out in an almost reverent silence, like mourners leaving a state funeral. Clearly, the film had the same impact on everyone else in the theater that it had on me.

Schindler's List

(more…)

Posted by in Movie Reviews | 1 Comment »

Downfall (2004)

Wednesday, August 31st, 2005
★★★★★

The war is lost… But if you think that I’ll leave Berlin for that, you are sadly mistaken. I’d prefer to put a bullet in my head.

The German film Downfall details, rather unflinchingly, the horrific and often bizarre last twelve days of the Nazi regime during April and May of 1945. By now, Adolf Hitler (Bruno Ganz) has retreated to the bunker as Stalin’s forces encircle the city of Berlin. Bent and infirm, he is no longer the beer hall firebrand of the early Nazi era.

Downfall

The last few holdouts like Heinrich Himmler (Ulrich Noethen) and Joseph Goebbels (Ulrich Matthes), gather around the Führer as he orders counter attacks by armies that exist only in his fevered imagination. His generals attempt to convince him that there is no hope and they should appeal to the western powers to broker a peace. Hitler and a few fanatical yes-men like Goebbels squash any such attempts at reason.

(more…)

Posted by in Movie Reviews | Comments Off