World War Two
Lee review - shaky biopic of an iconic photographerFriday, 13 September 2024
Anyone who has seen Lee Miller’s photographs – those taken of her in the 1920s when she was a dazzling American beauty, those she took as a World War Two photojournalist – and read about her extraordinary life will have thought: this will make... Read more... |
The Third Man rides again - 75th anniversary of Carol Reed's noir classicFriday, 06 September 2024
It was originally released in Britain 75 years ago this month, making its debut in a small cinema in Hastings on 1 September 1949, and quite a few people will tell you that The Third Man is their all-time favourite film. Carol Reed’s noir classic... Read more... |
Blu-ray: Army of ShadowsTuesday, 25 June 2024
One of those rare films that leaves you speechless after the closing credits, Jean-Pierre Melville’s Army of Shadows (L'Armée des ombres) sounds on paper as if it shouldn’t work.Melville’s penultimate film (it was released in 1969), this World War 2... Read more... |
Freud's Last Session review - Freud and CS Lewis search for meaning in 1939Wednesday, 19 June 2024
How can it be part of God’s plan to allow so much pain and suffering in the world, asks Sigmund Freud (Anthony Hopkins) of a young Oxford don, CS Lewis (Matthew Goode). His daughter Sophie died of the Spanish flu, his grandson, aged only five, of TB... Read more... |
Blu-ray: The Small Back RoomTuesday, 18 June 2024
Powell and Pressburger’s least remembered Forties film is shrouded in Blitz darkness, deepening in the warped flat where alcoholic weapons expert Sammy (David Farrar) stares at a whisky bottle as if it’s a bomb. Following the vivid English fantasias... Read more... |
Annie Jacobsen: Nuclear War: A Scenario review - on the inconceivableFriday, 29 March 2024
"[A]n unimaginably beautiful day": this was how Kikue Shiota described the morning of the 6th of August, 1945, in Hiroshima. The day was soon to change, unimaginably, as the city was blitzed by the airburst of the first atomic bomb, nicknamed Little... Read more... |
Theresienstadt-Terezin 1941-1945, Nash Ensemble, Wigmore Hall review - memorial music of stunning impactTuesday, 12 March 2024
Towards the end of his book Killers of the Flower Moon, David Grann deploys a cogent expression: “chasing history, before it disappears”.Last time the Nash Ensemble devoted a weekend here to music from the Terezín concentration camp, in 2010, there... Read more... |
Nachtland, Young Vic review - German black comedy brings uneasy humour and discomfiting relevanceThursday, 29 February 2024
If Mark Twain thought that a German joke was no laughing matter, what would he make of a German comedy? That quote came to mind more than once during Patrick Marber’s production of Marius von Mayenburg’s 2022 play, Nachtland. I know it’s... Read more... |
Occupied City review - unquiet Nazi crimesTuesday, 13 February 2024
“I feel as if I am live reporting from a shipwreck,” Dutch-Jewish journalist Philip Mechanicus wrote en route to his concentration camp murder. Steve McQueen’s four-hour reverie on Amsterdam’s Nazi occupation teases out the scars of that arbitrary,... Read more... |
The Zone of Interest review - garden gates of deathFriday, 02 February 2024
The jokey serious point in Mel Brooks’s The Producers is that you shouldn’t be able to make a musical set among Nazis. But if you shouldn’t make a musical, can you make any fiction?The renowned chronicler of the death camps, Elie Wiesel, said that a... Read more... |
The Most Precious of Goods, Marylebone Theatre review - old-fashioned storytelling of an all-too relevant taleTuesday, 30 January 2024
As last week’s news evidenced, genocide never really goes out of fashion. So it’s only right and proper that art continues to address the hideous concept and, while nothing, not even Primo Levi’s shattering If This Is a Man, can capture the scale of... Read more... |
Masters of the Air, Apple TV+ review - painful and poignant account of the Eighth Air Force's bombing campaignThursday, 25 January 2024
“Are they all like that?” asks a shaken Major Bucky Egan (Callum Turner), after he’s completed his first bombing mission over Germany as a guest of the US Eighth Air Force’s 389th Bomb Group. They’ve been battered by flak and lacerated by German... Read more... |
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