Yugoslav partisans grimly crop the hair of a village quintet of women believed to have consorted with the occupational Nazis. Four, for various reasons, have indeed – and their seducer is a lone, swaggering sergeant whom the partisans briskly emasculate. Escorted out of town by the sheepish Nazis, the forlorn ladies link up, patriotically and romantically, with a band of tough mountain guerrillasRead More »
Plot:
In the conflict with the enemy in a already lost battle, at risk to die in vain, partisan Mitko Angelov, is leaving the battlefield. He boards on the train and goes to see his mother, who has just returned from internment. When he returned to the brigade, he was declared a deserter, disarmed and bound. Since he lost his weapon, the Commissioner sent him to patrol in action, to take a weapon from Germans. All partisans from the patrol were killed except Mitko and Vane, who was seriously wounded. Thinking that Vane is dead, Angelov returns was in the brigade. But the commander did not believe him, thinking that he had fled from the battle, and imprisons him in the basement. In the meantime, a wounded fighter Vane is showing up, and the story of the heroic struggle. But at the same time, a military court sentenced him to death for desertion.Read More »
Synopsis :
After settling his differences with a Japanese PoW camp commander, a British colonel co-operates to oversee his men’s construction of a railway bridge for their captors – while oblivious to a plan by the Allies to destroy it. (imdb)Read More »
Quote:
A quote from Bertolt Brecht ends this bitter and angry war film by Sam Peckinpah: “Do not rejoice in his defeat, you men. For though the world has stood up and stopped the bastard, the bitch that bore him is in heat again.” Peckinpah’s intense and belligerently non-commercial work, (based on the book by Willi Heinrich), is a World War II tale told from the German perspective, following a platoon of German soldiers in the Russia of 1943, when the German Wehrmacht forces had been decimated and the Germans were retreating along the Russian front. James Coburn is Steiner, a German corporal and recipient of the Iron Cross who feels that he owes his loyalty to his family and fellow soldiers and not to Hitler and the German war machine. But when a new commander, Captain Stransky (Maximillian Schell), takes over the platoon, Steiner and Stransky come into immediate conflict. Stransky is a career soldier, the complete opposite of Steiner, and a man who pledges himself heart and soul to Hitler and the war. But he envies Steiner for having been awarded an Iron Cross and deeply desires one himself. The problem is Stransky is a complete coward and recognizes that the only way he can be awarded an Iron Cross would be to get the bitter Steiner on his side.Read More »
At the turn of the twentieth century, three Australian army lieutenants are court-martialed for alleged war crimes committed while fighting in South Africa. With no time to prepare, an Australian major, appointed as defense attorney, must prove that they were just following orders and are being made into political pawns by the British imperial command. Director Bruce Beresford garnered international acclaim for this riveting drama set during a dark period in his country’s colonial history, and featuring passionate performances by Edward Woodward, Bryan Brown, and Jack Thompson; rugged cinematography by Donald McAlpine; and an Oscar-nominated script, based on true events.Read More »
This film is a typical representative of the Serbian 60s Black Wave film. It attacks some social aspects of Tito’s communist regime, depicting two practically indigenous brothers that came from a small highland village and joined the communist partisans in WWII. After the war, they return to their village, revealing to each other that each has stolen a submachine gun from the army. It’s social critique is quite obvious, according to the film trend in Yugoslavia of that time. It’s plot line is blurred by some surreal inserted symbolical shots. Whereas some of these are brilliant , some of these are quite hard to explain and comprehend. A great film to be seen, (quite hefty cinematography) with some extraordinary choices in visual composition of the contents of particular shots. However, some parts are bit confusing, even more so, I assume, to the non-Yugoslavian audience.Read More »
Volodymyr Denysenko’s searing partisan drama is a neglected masterpiece of Soviet Ukrainian cinema. Recounting a partisan attack on a Nazi officer and the brutal recriminations that follow, Vasyl Zemliak’s quasi-autobiographical script draws on his own experiences in occupied rural Ukraine during World War Two. Denysenko renders Zemliak’s existentialist drama of conviction and sacrifice in starkly poetic visuals, accompanied by the discordant score of Krzysztof Penderecki. Conscience was shot as a diploma project in an effort to evade the censors, but was still denied a release and only screened in 1989. Reminiscent of Larisa Shepitko’s The Ascent, it is less celebrated than its contemporaries in the Ukrainian “poetic cinema” movement, but remains a clarion call of anti-war filmmaking.Read More »
Synopsis:
In 1938 Austria shortly after the Nazi occupation, a prominent Viennese intellectual, Werner von Basil, is arrested for smuggling art treatures out of the country and imprisoned by the Gestapo in a hotel room without any mental sustence of any kind to break him down to make him talk while a young ballerina, named Irene Adreny whom is the lover of the SS officer Berger playing mind games on von Basil, tries to intervene and help the poor intellectual keep his mind intact.Read More »
Peter Berdon joins a group of Stalinists after his father is killed by the Nazis in this grim political drama. The film begins with his arrest and uses flashbacks to tell the events that led to his incarceration. His abuse is chronicled both in and out of prison after he falls in with a Bonnie and Clyde-like duo after the war is over.
The first film for which Laibach composed a soundtrackRead More »