Holocaust
The White Factory, Marylebone Theatre review - what price dignity in hell?Thursday, 21 September 2023
This powerful play’s immediate backstory, with Moscow sentencing its author to eight years’ jail and its director going into forced exile, is not its immediate theme – and all the better for it, for how can anyone yet make any authentic dramatic... Read more... |
A. Anatoli: Babi Yar - The Story of Ukraine's Holocaust review - a masterpiece uncensoredFriday, 05 May 2023
The great Russian novelists of the 19th century wrote what Henry James called "large, loose, baggy monsters" out of belief that "truth" was more important than artistic form. The 20th-century Russian-Ukrainian writer A. Anatoli, who renounced his... Read more... |
Watch on the Rhine, Donmar Warehouse review - Lillian Hellman's 1940 play is still asking awkward questionsWednesday, 11 January 2023
We’re reminded, in a grainy black and white video framing device, that, as late as the summer of 1941, the USA saw World War II as just another European war. As brilliantly illustrated in Phillip Roth’s The Plot Against America, not only was such... Read more... |
Three Minutes: A Lengthening review - superb portrait of a vanished worldMonday, 05 December 2022
We hear the projector whirr as the mute 16mm film flows through the sprockets and on to the screen. For three minutes and a little longer we watch children and adults spilling out of buildings, intrigued by the novelty of a camera on their streets.... Read more... |
Olivier Guez: The Disappearance of Josef Mengele review - the Nazi who was never foundThursday, 01 September 2022
Bringing Olivier Guez’s novel The Disappearance of Josef Mengele on a beach holiday may seem like an odd choice (such is the lot of a reviewer). This incongruity transformed into something stranger, however, when I learned that the Nazi doctor Josef... Read more... |
Total Immersion: Music for the End of Time review - miracles from the house of the deadMonday, 24 January 2022
History’s most grotesque act of cynicism has to be the model ghetto the Nazis mocked up for the cameras in Terezin/Theresienstadt in October 1944, several days before transporting all the musicians and smartly-dressed attendees present at the... Read more... |
Anselm Kiefer Pour Paul Celan, Grand Palais Éphémère, Paris review - an installation of rare profundityTuesday, 21 December 2021
The exhibitions of the German artist Anselm Kiefer have always been spectacular: large works with a numinous presence, often breath-taking and always mysterious. His new installation in Paris’s Grand Palais Ephémère, the temporary structure at the... Read more... |
Love and Other Acts of Violence, Donmar Warehouse review - snappy and tightly intelligent but flawedTuesday, 19 October 2021
This is simultaneously a love story and an archaeology of hate, a sparky, spiky encounter between two individuals whose chemistry proves as destructive as it is explosive.Love and Other Acts of Violence opens with a comedic encounter on a dance... Read more... |
DVD/Blu-ray: Mr KleinTuesday, 14 September 2021
Joseph Losey’s career covered a great deal of ground, and several continents. From The Boy with the Green Hair, a noirish sci-fi film from 1948, through to his richly psychological collaborations with Harold Pinter, The Servant (1963), Accident (... Read more... |
The Champion of Auschwitz review - Polish movie based on a boxer's memoirWednesday, 08 September 2021
It’s a little hard to tell if this film was really intended for an international release, given that its heart is so set on making Polish movie-goers proud of their countrymen. The Champion of Auschwitz recounts the true story of Tadeusz "Teddy... Read more... |
DVD/Blu-ray: The Fifth Horseman is FearTuesday, 07 September 2021
One of several 1960s Czech films which explicitly addresses the Holocaust, Zbyněk Brynych’s 1964 thriller The Fifth Horseman is Fear ( …a pátý jezdec je starch) wrong-foots us from the first frame. There’s Jiří Sternwald’s jagged, brittle score, and... Read more... |
Misha and the Wolves review - tricksy documentary about a child survivorSunday, 05 September 2021
It has become so hard to find funding for non-fiction films that many documentary makers now feel compelled to sell their stories as racy detective yarns, larded with dramatic scores and sneakily obfuscating narratives. There’s a piece of deception... Read more... |
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