The Promised Land (Bastarden) I have often found that anything that Mads Mikkelsen is in is usually great and if it is not, it’s not his fault. I say that realizing that I’ve never seen a Danish film of his. So this was my first Danish language film of his. […]
World War II
A Forgotten Man (2022) The Seperation of Established History from Story (Review)
First things first. A Forgotten Man, despite its stage inspirations (Thomas Hürlimann’s Der Gesandte [The Envoy]), is a film made by a cinephile. The clue is the use of black-and-white, in most films now shot in monochrome, the art is often that of a below-average collagist. The awkward and unintended incongruity of […]
Love Gets a Room (2021): A Holocaust Musical? (Review)
A movie about the Holocaust…but it’s a musical. You’ve got to admit, it takes some cojones to make that movie. Spanish director Rodrigo Cortés obviously believes he has those cojones. The filmmaker resposinble for the challenge of 2010’s claustrophobic, single-setting thriller Buried, steps up now to make Love Gets a […]
Brooklyn 45 (2023) “I’ve Got No Faith Left”: Grief, Trauma and Haunting (Review)
Onoda: 10,000 Nights in the Jungle (2021) (Cinema Review)
The Tin Drum (1979) He Bangs the Drum (Review)
Five Graves to Cairo (1943) Influential in Many Surprising Ways (Review)
One of the most curious Allied operations to occur during World War Two was arguably Operation Copperhead, masterminded by one Brigadier Dudley Clarke. A small military deception, Copperhead saw the Allies dupe the German high command whose intelligence expected General Bernard Montgomery to play a significant role in the 1944 […]
Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence (1983) The Sexual or the Spiritual? (Review)
Released to Blu-ray by Arrow Academy this last week, Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence is the renowned Japanese new wave filmmaker Nagisa Ōshima’s 1983 adaptation of Sir Laurens van der Post’s semi-autobiographical works, The Seed and the Sower from 1963 and The Night of the New Moon from 1970, each inspired […]