War

At once brutally realistic and highly theatrical, Tim Blake Nelson’s screen version of his play “The Grey Zone” may well evoke the mechanized horror in the bowels of the Nazi death camps more vividly than any fictional film to date.

But its staccato, Mamet-style dialogue exchanges, breathless pacing and remarkably healthy, well-fed-looking actors create a cumulative sense of artificiality that seriously undercuts the devastating effect clearly being sought in this fictionalized dramatization of the only organized uprising ever attempted by the prisoners at Auschwitz.

Laudably avoiding cheap sentimentality and phony heroics in its aggressive investigation of an all-but-impossible moral quandary, this is a relentless, hard-edged, tough-minded picture that, even with supportive reviews, faces an uphill commercial struggle upon planned release by Lions Gate next spring.Read More »

Plot
Autumn in the 1990s. An Estonian village in Abkhazia. Forest-covered hills, the sea, tangerine orchards. The Abkhazian War in Georgia. Two villagers – an old man Ivo and his neighbour Markus – are the only ones who haven’t left. Markus wants to harvest his tangerine plantation, although Ivo is against cropping during wartime. As the war approaches and the conflict takes place before their very eyes, Ivo finds a survior on the battlefield – a wounded Caucasian man Akhmed. Despite the danger Ivo takes him to his place. When Markus, while burying the perished Georgians, also finds a survivor. The tangerin harvesters now must resolve their own war, happening under their roof with enemies from both sides.Read More »

A young intellectual conscientious objector is forced to serve with the Japanese army in Manchuria. He joins with a dim-witted former gangster in an effort to desert by stealing a train.Read More »

From Criterion Collection:

Eisenstein drew on history, Russian folk narratives, and the techniques of Walt Disney to create this broadly painted epic of Russian resilience. This story of Teutonic knights vanquished by Prince Alexander Nevsky’s tactical brilliance resonated deeply with a Soviet Union concerned with the rise of Nazi Germany. Widely imitated—most notably by Laurence Olivier’s Battle of Agincourt re-creation for Henry V —the Battle on the Ice scene remains one of the most famous audio-visual experiments in film history, perfectly blending action with the rousing score of Sergei Prokofiev.Read More »

Review I

In 1938 Berlin, Gudrun Landgrebe, wife of Nazi functionary Kevin McNally, begins taking art lessons. She makes the acquaintance of another student, Japanese ambassador’s daughter Mio Takaki. Soon afterwards, the two women begin a passionate lesbian affair. This leads to a chain reaction of disaster and tragedy, culminating with the inevitable intervention of the Gestapo. Despite the film’s galloping sexual passions, The Berlin Affair is an exercise in aloofness, keeping the characters at arm’s length-surprising, considering that the director was Liliana Cavani, auteur of the erotic classic The Night Porter (1974). The film was based on The Buddhist Cross, a novel by Junichiro Tanizaki. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie GuideRead More »

Macedonian partisans take up the struggle against Bulgarian fascists that occupy Macedonia. This was not by any means an easy battle since Bulgaria was the only German ally that did not send troops to the Russian front. Thus, the entire Bulgarian military machine could, without distraction, dedicate its efforts to crushing the Macedonian resistance.Read More »

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The film, a thoroughly enjoyable ‘odd duck’, with a typical quasi-political artistic stance on the follies of war. Highly entertaining and, at times, touching.

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WHEN Joan Littlewood’s London improvisation, “Oh! What a Lovely War,” opened on Broadway five years ago, it had a cast of 18 men and women dressed as Pierrots and Columbines. In the pit was an orchestra that managed to recreate the nostalgic musical sounds of World War I and to comment on them—sometimes simultaneously.

The show itself, described as “a musical entertainment,” was a jolly satire on the madness of the First World War, done mostly in period songs and sketches in which the Pierrots and Columbines slipped in and out of almost invisible disguises as emperors, generals, nurses, music hall stars, Tommies, wives, nurses and spectators, some appalled, some bored.Read More »

Plot synopsis by Don Kaye from allmovieguide:

Das Boot is one of the most gripping and authentic war movies ever made. Based on an autobiographical novel by German World War II photographer Lothar-Guenther Buchheim, the film follows the lives of a fearless U-Boat captain (Jurgen Prochnow) and his inexperienced crew as they patrol the Atlantic and Mediterranean in search of Allied vessels, taking turns as hunter and prey. There’s very little plot, so the movie’s power comes from both its riveting, epic battle scenes and its details of the boring hours spent waiting for orders or signs of the enemy. With the exception of one staunch Hitler Youth lieutenant, none of the crew is particularly loyal to the Nazis, and some are openly hostile toward their Fuhrer; this allows viewer sympathy with the men as they perform their laborious, monotonous duties in cramped, filthy quarters, or await death as depth charges explode all around the sub. Prochnow is excellent as the nerves-of-steel commander, and many of the supporting actors — all German — are solid as well, although the characterizations border on war movie clichés (the young crewman who has left behind his pregnant girlfriend, the Chief Engineer whose wife is seriously ill). Read More »

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Set in the same place and about the same war, “No Man’s Land” is like the grown-up version of “Behind Enemy Lines.” It’s a bleakly funny parable that could be titled “Between Enemy Lines.” In Bosnia in 1993, Serbs and Croats find themselves trapped in the same trench. Anyone who sticks his head up gets shot. And when will that land mine explode? The setup seems artificial until you reflect that things like this probably do happen in the confusion of war. As the film opens, a few Croatian fighters are lost in a battlefield fog, and decide to wait until dawn to go further. When the sun burns away the mist, they find themselves staring directly at Serbian troops. Some are killed. Ciki (Branko Djuric) falls into a trench and is spared.Read More »