Tag: Nazi

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From Hilde, With Love
(In Liebe, Eure Hilde)

Director – Andreas Dresen – 2024 – Germany – Cert. 15 – 125m

***

A young, pregnant German woman involved with a group of radicals trying to undermine the Nazi regime is arrested and put on trial with a possible death sentence – out in UK cinemas accompanied by the Kate Bush short Little Shrew (Snowflake) on Friday, June 27th

Its opening, pre-credits moments of a German mother and bespectacled, pregnant adult daughter picking strawberries in the garden belies what is to follow, but that sense of calm doesn’t last long as two barely seen black cars pull up in the lane. The pregnant woman packs a suitcase before the two men accompany her out to the car. How long will it take, she asks. That depends on you, comes the reply.

In the lift, the big, burly man asks after her pregnancy. It seems his wife, too, is expecting. When she is questioned in the interrogation room, she is asked about her husband’s radio equipment, on the table in front of her in a suitcase. She makes up stories about her innocence and ignorance, but they (including, when we finally see him, the man from the lift) run rings round her.… Read the rest

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Documentary Features Live Action Movies

Riefenstahl

Director – Andres Veiel – 2024 – Germany – Cert. 15 – 115m

*****

An unsettling, deep dive into the indisputable artistic talent, evasive personality and self-reconstructed memory of Nazi filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl through her personal archive of some 700 boxes – out in UK cinemas on Friday, May 9th

Sepia / yellow images. A woman walking by the sea. Incidental music suggesting a reaching, a striving. Out of focus images of crowds lining the streets, coming into focus to proclaim, “Heil, mein Fuhrer.” The lighting of the Olympic flame, the firing of a gun at a track event. Leni Riefenstahl, as a young woman, examining hanging strips of 35mm film at the editor’s bench. And then an extract from a talk show: would she do it differently if she could live her life again? What were her mistakes? Her close association with Hitler? She hesitates – you can almost feel her squirming, trying to find a way round the question. She starts talking about her first film as director, The Blue Light (1932), a mountaineering picture in which she did all the rock climbing stunts herself. She didn’t know of Hitler at this point, she says. “If the Fascists saw you”, she was told, “you would become their hero.”… Read the rest

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Documentary Features Live Action Movies

Riefenstahl

Directed by Andres Veiel
Certificate 15
115 minutes
Released 9 May

There is something deeply depressing about the fact that one of the most talented female film directors who ever lived is also without a doubt also one of the most troubling. Leni Riefenstahl (1902-2003) is best known today for the documentaries Triumph of the Will (1935) and Olympia (1938), the first a record of the Nazi Party’s Nuremberg Rally, the second of the 1936 Olympics in Berlin. Both eulogise large scale spectacle, with Olympia in particular celebrating the human body as it undergoes the rigour of sports disciplines. Both celebrate victory, superiority, dominance.

Riefenstahl lived to the ripe old age of 101, claiming over the years that she was an artist who happened to fall in with the Third Reich by dint of birthplace and time; she didn’t really understand what that regime was doing and simply got on with making the films that she made under their patronage.

There have been documentaries about her before, yet what makes this one different is that… [read the rest at Reform magazine…]

[Read my alternative review on this site…]

Trailer:

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Features Live Action Movies

Lee

Director – Ellen Kuras – 2023 – UK – Cert. 15 – 116m

****

Former fashion model Lee Miller, played by producer Kate Winslet, reinvents herself as a war photographer for London Vogue at the start of World War Two – out in UK cinemas on Friday, September 13th

It’s all too easy to assume (as per the ‘auteur’ theory espoused by the French ‘Cahiers du Cinema’ critics of the 1950s) that films are the works of directors. If one had to pick a single creative force behind this film, however, it would be the person who put it all together as producer before any director or writer were involved as collaborators.

That producer was the actress Kate Winslet who wanted to make a film about Vogue model turned photographer Lee Miller. Winslet doesn’t look much like the tall statuesque beauty that Lee Miller was in her younger days, and it didn’t occur to her to portray Lee Miller herself until some way into the process of putting the film together.

To direct the film, Winslet has chosen former cinematographer Ellen Kuras, an appropriate choice since Kuras has worked on documentaries shooting such musicians as David Byrne, Bob Dylan, Lou Reed and Neil Young, lensed narrative features on the such diverse cultural figures as Jane Goodall and Andy Warhol, and worked with unique film director Michel Gondry.… Read the rest

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Documentary Features Live Action Movies

Fantastic Machine
(original title:
And the King Said,
What a Fantastic Machine)

Directors – Axel Danielson, Maximilien Van Aertryck – 2023 – Norway, Sweden, Denmark – Cert. 15 – 88m

****

An idiosyncratic history of moving image technology and its increasingly pervasive role in human society, from camera obscura to smartphones and social media – out in UK cinemas on Friday, April 19th

To understand what this movie is about, which I’m not sure I did going in, you have to understand its title. The fantastic machine in question is, in part, the camera. That might lead you to anticipate a history of photography, but that’s not quite what this is about. You’d be forgiven for believing that, though, for the first few minutes when we see a contemporary, on the street, walk-in exhibit of the camera obscura or pinhole camera, a natural optical phenomenon whereby light passes through a simple pinhole onto a surface or screen beyond to recreate an inverted image of where the light came from. As a visitor marvels of the resultant, real time moving image of people outside the exhibit walking around, “it’s upside down”. As a human guide to the exhibition explains, that’s how the human eye works. Our brains correct the upside down image so that appears the right way up.… Read the rest

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Documentary Features Live Action Movies

Anselm
(Anselm
– Das Rauschen
Der Zeit)

Director – Wim Wenders – 2023 – Germany – Cert. PG – 93m

****

An exploration of the work of German artist Anselm Kiefer and the influences which lie behind it – 3D documentary plays the 2023 London Film Festival which runs from Wednesday, October 4th until Sunday, October 15th, and will be out in UK cinemas on Friday, December 8th

Wim Wenders seems to step effortlessly between narrative and documentary feature films, and you never feel that he considers one or the other more important. To him, they are all movies. As with his earlier Pina (2011), similarly about an artist – the choreographer Pina Bausch – this is another portrait of an artist shot in 3D. Wenders’ subject here, again eponymously designated by Christian name, is Anselm Kiefer, a practitioner of the plastic rather than the performing arts.

From the outset, it’s clear that the film needs to be seen in 3D. Wenders’ camera moves deliberately and formally around maquettes that resemble life-sized women wearing dresses, but without the women in them so that they stand as empty objects, often with strange constructions in the space where you would expect their neck and heads to be. The forest setting in which Wenders films them seems almost as significant as the maquettes themselves as we slowly pass by an upright tree trunk between the sculpture and us.… Read the rest

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One Of Our Aircraft
Is Missing

Producers-Writers-Directors – The Archers (Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger) – 1942 – UK – Cert. PG – 103m

*****

Forced to bail out following an otherwise successful mission in which one engine is disabled, a British bomber crew must find their way across occupied Holland to return to the safety of Britain – part of major season Cinema Unbound: The Creative Worlds Of Powell + Pressburger from Monday, October 16th at BFI Southbank, also on BFI Blu-ray; other films in the season can be found on BFI Player

Made at the height of World War II, the first Powell and Pressburger / The Archers movie to deploy that verbal credit as such – but without their later trademark opening shot of an arrow striking its target – is in essence a propaganda exercise in the guise of a narrative feature film made to bolster wartime morale at home. However, the pair pull the whole thing off with such verve and inventiveness that it feels less an exercise in propaganda and more a rattling good yarn (without compromising either way).

It opens like a bizarre ghost story (as bizarre as the curse upon the Lairds of Kiloran in the castle ruins of “i know where I’m going!”… Read the rest

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Indiana Jones
And The
Dial Of Destiny

Director – James Mangold – 2022 – US / UK – Cert. 12a – 154m

*****

In the late 1960s, the newly-retired archaeologist is dragged by his goddaughter into a globetrotting adventure involving Nazis and ancient artefacts – out in UK cinemas on Wednesday, June 28th

In 1945 in Europe, at the close of the Second World War, whilst fighting Nazis led by archaeologist Dr. Voller (Mads Mikkelsen) both in a castle and on a train, archaeologists Henry Jones (Harrison Ford) and Basil Shaw (Toby Jones) gain possession of an ancient artefact, the Archimedes Dial aka the Antekythera mechanism.

Over two decades later in 1969 in New York, on the day of his retirement from academia, Jones is approached by his late colleague’s daughter – his goddaughter – Helena Shaw (Phoebe Waller-Bridge) who, following her research into her father’s obsession with the artefact, believes she knows the location of one half of the dial, broken into two separate pieces by its maker Archimedes to prevent it falling into unsuitable hands.

She’s wrong though: Jones has it, although possibly not for long as a cabal of Dr. Voller plus Nazis including the trigger-happy Klaber (Boyd Holbrook), the 7’2 Hauke (Olivier Richters) and a CIA agent Mason (Shaunette Renée Wilson) turn up to regain its possession.… Read the rest

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Sisu
(Sisu)

Director – Jalmari Helander – 2022 – Finland – Cert. 15 – 91m

****

A gold miner taking time out from WW2 must get past a Nazi unit in the Lapland wilderness in order to deposit his gold at the bank – entertaining but violent gorefest is out in UK cinemas on Friday, May 26th

1944. Lapland. A man (Jorma Tommila from director Helander’s Big Game, 2014; Rare Exports: A Christmas Tale, 2010) has withdrawn from the war to search for gold in the wilderness. The retreating German army, meanwhile, is pursuing a ‘scorched earth’ policy, destroying everything in its path. The man digs. He finds a rich seam of gold. He fills his saddlebags. Now all he has to do is get them to the nearest bank in the nearest town.

He sets off with his horse and his dog. Between him and his destination is a Nazi unit with a ruthless, sadistic commander (Aksel Hennie from The Middle Man, Bent Hamer, 2021, The Martian, Ridley Scott, 2015; Pioneer, Erik Skjoldbjærg, 2013; Headhunters, Morten Tyldum, 2011), a tank and two lorries carrying German infantry and Finnish women prisoners respectively.

All this takes place in a world where everyone, Finns and Germans, speak English.… Read the rest