Although I was an AP scholar in both European and American history in high school, I don’t count myself as a history buff. An occasional historical biography or autobiography is about the extent of my interest. This limitation means that I can’t always tell the real history from the events on the big screen when […]

Imagine a film in which all of the living presidents of this country — or any country for that matter — talked about their successes, failures and strategies for their administrations. It would be a gift to politics fans and history buffs alike because of the perspectives and stories concentrated into a couple of hours. It’s one […]

Matthew Fox stars as a World War II general who walks a tightrope between revenge and justice for Japan’s divine leader in Emperor. Fox plays Brigadier General Bonner Fellers, a member of General Douglas MacArthur‘s staff. MacArthur is recreated here in commendable fashion by Tommy Lee Jones. The movie literally starts off with a big bang as […]

Israel’s interior security service—the Shin Bet—is the target of a surprising documentary in The Gatekeepers. The most fascinating element of the movie is that it’s very much a self-examination as the only people interviewed are the very individuals who led the organization for the last 30 years—and this is the first time they’ve ever spoken on record. […]

World War II seems to be an endless supply of perspectives and stories that surface in books, movies and various other forms of historical records. The best of these introduce something unexpected and perhaps unsettling to the way you look at a group, location or ideology. Lore uses all of the familiar tropes of fairy […]

A teenage girl in Nazi Germany is left to look after her younger siblings in the closing months of World War II in Lore. There are few subject matters that have been the focus of more films than the Holocaust. Countless films have covered the period from virtually every conceivable perspective to the point of […]

Much to my surprise I found it necessary to see yet another holocaust film — In Darkness. I find that even among my Jewish friends that holocaust films are pushing the limits of saturation for just about everyone. Very few people can bear to sit through yet another gut punch that pretty much has to be […]

I finally got around to seeing The Men Who Stare at Goats. The previews for this one had me thinking that it looked like a dark comedy that might be a bit too dark. Yet it still had something that kept me interested in it. One of the big concerns was the director, Grant Heslof, […]

This weekend was another double-movie weekend in my sure-to-fail quest to get back into the swing of seeing nearly as many movies as I have the last two years. First up was Inglourious Basterds. It’s the latest movie from scatter-shot director Quentin Tarantino. I’ve enjoyed a few of his past efforts—most notably Kill Bill Vol. […]

The next movie for this weekend is Defiance starring Daniel Craig outside his Bond persona. It’s 1941 and the Germans are storming through Eastern Europe. The plan is wholesale slaughter especially with regard to the Russian Jews they encounter along the way. Craig plays a true life character that, in the attempt to save his own family’s life, becames entangled in […]

This week I headed out to ski for the first time this year after taking last season off entirely. It became evident at the end of the season before that my leg still wasn’t recovered enough from my earlier break. While I went into the winter of 07-08 with lots of hope that just wasn’t […]

Three of us took in the foreign film, The Counterfeiters last night. It’s a German-language film that tells the true story of a select group of Jewish prisoners in a Nazi concentration camp. These prisoners are spared a trip to the gas chamber to take part in a more covert engagement. The Nazi’s plan to destabilize […]