Review – Nuremberg

Despite the high quality of the acting and other production values, I’m not sure this accomplishes much that wasn’t already done by Judgment at Nuremberg 65 years ago. Indeed, I was a little surprised to see the first set of Nazi defendants – particularly big fish Herman Goering (Russell Crowe) – humanized to this extent. I believe I understand the filmmakers’ intent to use the “banality of evil” approach as a warning that people can be monsters even without horns and fangs (a particularly poignant lesson in the current climate). But then the good guys also seem cynical, incompetent, dishonest or otherwise morally ambiguous. Thus the movie was fun to watch but a little unsettling to reflect upon. Mildly amusing

Review – Grey Matter

One of the items on the Nazis’ long list of vile crimes was the murder of disabled and neurodiverse children. Hundreds of these kids were killed in Austria’s Spiegelgrund “clinic” under the supervision of Heinrich Gross, who added to his crimes by preserving the children’s brains and other body parts in jars. If your workplace gets a betting pool going about the year when the government finally acknowledged what happened and agreed to give the remains proper burial, be sure to put your money on 2002. That’s also the year that filmmaker Joe Berlinger made this movie about the situation and sought an interview with ancient-but-not-yet-dead Gross. Spoiler alert: I was relieved that they couldn’t track him down, as he would doubtless have simply claimed to be unable to remember what he’d done (a lie he’d told in court in the past). His victims deserved to be memorialized without granting their killer any screen time at all, so I’m sorry they even tried to find him. Beyond that this is a powerful documentary about an important subject. Worth seeing

Review – Operation Finale

The story of Aldoph Eichmann’s trial has been told several times, including fact-based and highly fictionalized versions. But oddly there’s been less focus on the dramatic events surrounding his capture in Argentina by Mossad agents. This movie remedies the shortage to good effect, telling the dramatic story with all its highs and lows. Mildly amusing

Review – The Pawnbroker

This works better as a piece of film history than as a film. In the early 1960s the American movie industry found itself hampered by its own production code and increasingly unable to compete with films from European market. This Sidney Lumet production was the first to successfully petition for code exception in order to show a brief nude scene. It’s also one of the first movies to take on the horrors of the Holocaust. It’s also Morgan Freeman’s big screen debut in an uncredited role. Unfortunately the picture itself is hard to watch. Rod Steiger plays the title character, emotionally killed decades earlier by the Nazis but still going through the motions of running a pawn shop in one of the seedier sections of New York City. Though the concept had potential, the French New Wave aesthetic, laconic plot, theatrical dialogue and discordant Quincy Jones score thoroughly spoil the experience. See if desperate

Review – Frankenstein and the Monster from Hell

Terence Fisher takes the helm for the last time in this run-of-the-mill Hammer Frankenstein picture. A surgeon (Shane Briant) gets busted for digging up and dissecting corpses, and the judge commits him to an asylum. What luck for him that the loony bin’s eminence grise is none other than the legendary Baron (Peter Cushing) still up to his old tricks. He’s stitched dead patients (some of whom received a little assistance with their passing) into a hulking mass of makeup (David Prowse of Darth Vader fame). The usual jolt of electricity. The usual out of control rampage. Mildly amusing

Review – Harlan: In the Shadow of Jew Süss

The parts of this documentary that are actually abut Veit Harlan are fascinating. He directed the notorious Nazi propaganda movie Jüd Süss, raising crucial questions about the relationship between art and conduct and the culpability of artists for genocide. Sadly, most of the picture is devoted to his relatives (kids, grandkids, nephews and nieces, one of the latter married to Stanley Kubrick). Predictably enough, they had a variety of reactions to their genetic connection to the controversial filmmaker. It isn’t that their stories were completely dull. They just weren’t as interesting as the director himself. Mildly amusing

Review – The Diary of Anne Frank (1959)

I wish there was some way to watch this movie without knowing anything about it going in. Knowing how it ends makes every positive moment ironic rather than joyful. And though this may be a natural consequence of setting a drama entirely in an attic, the production has a theatrical quality to it. I would also have liked to have been able to view this from the perspective of an audience member in 1959. Nowadays we have no shortage of media treatments of the Holocaust, but back then this was groundbreaking stuff. Still, the story is amazingly emotionally effective even today. Worth seeing

Review – The Diary of Anne Frank (2009)

The problem with this story is that even though I know exactly how it’s going to end, I keep hoping everything will turn out okay. But of course it never does. This 21st century adaptation seems a little less like a stage play than its 1959 predecessor did. Otherwise it’s the same tragic tale. Worth seeing

Review – Good

This picture might have lived up to its title if it had just stuck to its premise. Viggo Mortensen mails in his performance as John Halder, a bookish academic caught up in the turmoil of the 1930s in Germany. Hitler takes a liking to the professor’s novel about a man who helps his terminally-ill wife kill herself. Goaded by the attention and a desire not to run afoul of the new regime, our “hero” ends up enlisting in the SS, and of course things go downhill from there. In the brief scenes that focus on the moral and ethical questions raised by euthanasia, this is an absolutely fascinating picture. Sadly, that’s maybe ten minutes out of an hour and a half. The rest is squandered on the protagonist’s arguments with a Jewish friend and the dreary details of his soapy private life. Plus the deceptively non-linear time stream. Plus the odd, go-nowhere scenes in which Halder hallucinates everyone around him singing. VSee if desperate

Review – It Happened Here

This movie should be an illustration in the dictionary for the phrase "labor of love." Filmmaker Kevin Brownlow and historian Andrew Mollo started working on this when they were both just teenagers, and it took nearly a decade to finish. The result was worth the wait. The story of a nurse trying to get by in an alternate-history England conquered by the Nazis is rough around the edges, but that fits the cinema verite shooting style. I like "what if" scenarios like this, and here the concept is used to cast an unflinching look at the atrocities of Nazism. Worth seeing

Review – Auschwitz: Inside the Nazi State

Six hours of the Holocaust, but at least it’s more interesting than Shoah. Actually, this is a really solid introduction to the subject, well paced with a good combination of interviews, recreations, location shots, computer simulations and historical footage. I wouldn’t tackle this on a cheerful, sunny summer day. But if you’re ready to face an honest portrayal of one of the most disgraceful chapters in human history, this six-part miniseries is an excellent experience. Worth seeing

Review – Mr. Klein

I’ve found that when I watch a movie recommended to me by my father that it’s often possible to pinpoint the exact “ah, that’s why he liked this” trigger. In this one it’s the spot late in the show when the title character and a friend accidentally plunk out “The International” on a piano in the presence of the police. The bigger picture is about an unscrupulous art collector who profits from Jewish people who have to sell their possessions on the cheap in order to escape Nazi-occupied France. But the tables turn on him when someone frames him as a member of the group he’s been callously exploiting. The foreground story is as boring as watching paint dry, but the background – the slow, meticulous run-up to the implementation of the Final Solution in France – is fascinating stuff. Mildly amusing

Review – Forgiving Dr. Mengele

How could anyone – particularly a direct victim of his vile “experiments” – ever possibly forgive Josef Mengele? For the answer to that we must turn to Eva Mozes Kor, the subject of this documentary. Kor and her twin sister somehow managed to survive Auschwitz, but unlike many other survivors she somehow found it in her heart many years later to heal some of the pain by forgiving the Angel of Death and his fellow mass murderers. The resulting consideration of the issues raises – without fully resolving – some fascinating questions about the nature of forgiveness. Worth seeing

Review – Homo Sapiens 1900

One of the things that frequently gets lost in consideration of the Nazis' genocidal atrocities is that they didn't exactly come up with the theories of “racial purity” that came to characterize their evil. But as productions such as this point out, eugenics didn't begin with Hitler. Instead, at one point it was considered at least a semi-legitimate branch of evolutionary biology in such "forward thinking" places as the United States. Though I already knew a little about the subject, I was startled to learn just how heavily the Soviets were into the whole selective breeding thing. Though this isn't an ultra-polished production, it nonetheless does a fine job of working with archive footage to bring to light a part of history that seems all too easy to ignore. Mildly amusing

Review – The Man in the Glass Booth

Though I’ve enjoyed Robert Shaw’s work as an actor – particularly as one of the villains in From Russia With Love and of course the quintessential Quint – his writing (if this script is any indication) is strictly amateur hour. He starts with an Eichmann-like abduction and trial, which should have supplied plenty of fodder for solid storytelling. But the production swiftly becomes mired in implausible drama and ludicrous speechmaking. The first act is insanely boring, composed of the inane ramblings of an old, rich, Jewish man (Maximillian Schell) who is seized by Israeli commandos and dragged off to stand trial as a Nazi concentration camp officer. His hearing drags on and on, the usual horror-filled testimony punctuated by the booth occupant’s absurd explanations for the Holocaust. And don’t even get me started on where it ends up. Actual footage from Eichmann’s trial was a million times more compelling than this weak, over-dramatized nonsense. What a tremendous disappointment. See if desperate

Review – The Specialist

This documentary edits footage from Adolf Eichmann’s trial together with spooky music to paint a portrait of “the banality of evil.” I could have done without the extra drama, as if the calm discussion of mass extermination of human beings wasn’t creepy enough without added sound effects. However, the portrait of the man that emerges from the unadulterated footage is fascinating. Eichmann sticks so fervently to the “I vas chust vollowink ordars” line that it’s almost enough to make one wonder how a normal person would react to such an insane situation. But the testimony also exposes the man’s (and his society’s) obsession with organization, as if genocide was nothing more than an interesting challenge of the proper arrangement of rail transport schedules. And every once in awhile the defendant slips up and reveals a little of the “real Eichmann,” such as the notorious “remorse is for little children” line. Though I thought that the film-making tricks were unnecessary, I found the rest of it fascinating. Worth seeing

Review – Anne Frank Remembered

No matter how many times I hear this story in no matter how many different retellings, I always find myself foolishly hoping that this time around the Franks won’t get caught, or perhaps that they’ll all survive the camps just a little bit longer and make it to liberation so they can be reunited in the end. This documentary distinguishes itself with interviews with people who knew the Franks – especially Anne – before or during the Holocaust. It also features quite an array of photos of the family, the kind of thing I just assumed had mostly been torched in the war. Worth seeing

Review – The Reader

Kate Winslett is hands-down the best part of this movie. And I’m not talking about the truly gratuitous amount of nudity she does, either. Instead, I was more impressed with some of the subtleties she managed to work into her character’s appearance and behavior as the plot ping-ponged back and forth in a range of years from the 50s to the 90s. Other than her performance, however, the production was fairly terrible. Though the conversion of the Holocaust into a tragic romance might – might – have worked, here it clearly doesn’t. The characters’ many moral “ambiguities” aren’t borderline cases at all. Instead we get crimes ranging from child molestation to mass murder that are all supposed to be subsumed by a boy’s bittersweet love for an illiterate former concentration camp guard. Though the production values are solid and the female lead’s performance worthy of the Oscar she received, the script largely undoes whatever potential the picture might have had. Mildly amusing

Review – Defiance

One of the biggest questions posed by the Holocaust is “why didn’t anyone fight back?” After all, if you’re going to be butchered anyway, you might as well take a few Nazis with you. Well, the answer is that many people did fight back. But of all the resistance groups, the Bielskis were one of the few that managed to organize a safe haven for refugees. Of course “safe” in occupied Belorussia was a relative thing, as this drama shows. Tuvia (Daniel Craig) organized the community in the forest while his hot-headed brother Zus (Liev Schreiber) joined the partisans to fight the Germans. The production values are Hollywood standard, and the script and acting likewise don’t particularly stand out. But the story alone is sufficiently fascinating to carry the day. Mildly amusing

Review – Secret Lives

This documentary is made all the more fascinating by its own lackluster production values. It looks and feels like nothing more than a bunch of old folks yakking on at length about childhood memories. However, these people’s childhoods were a bit different than most: during the Holocaust their Jewish parents left them with sympathetic families in order to save them from the Nazis. Through their recollections and old snapshots they tell heartbreaking stories of separation, the constant paranoia of hiding, good and bad times with their new families, and then the permanent sense of loss (and even an occasional reunion) after the war. Interviewees also include former foster parents and foster brothers and sisters. Worth seeing