Giles Alderson’s British thriller, Wolves of War, is thoroughly formulaic. Scheduled to be released on VOD and digital platforms on September 13, it takes place in Germany in 1945 during the dying days of World War II. The plot could not be more straightforward. British commandos are parachuted over Bavaria to rescue an American scientist […]
Ido and Yael Zand’s “fish-out-of-water” documentary, Gut Shabbes Vietnam, is captivatingly intriguing and appealing. Now available on the ChaiFlicks streaming platform, which specializes in Jewish and Israeli topics, it is mostly set in Ho Chi Minh City, which, until Vietnam’s unification in 1975, was known as Saigon. The film opens in 2006 in Jerusalem as […]
Carl Laemmle was truly one of the pioneers of the Hollywood movie industry. He founded and managed Universal Studios, which would be the biggest film producer in the United States. And he launched the careers of, among others, the director John Ford and the actress Mary Pickford. This German Jewish immigrant is profiled in James […]
Amid the dark clouds of the Holocaust, there was a remarkable silver lining. Not a single Jewish citizen of Bulgaria, an ally of Nazi Germany, was murdered. Indeed, all 49,000 Bulgarian Jews survived this unfathomable ordeal. Jacky and Lisa Comforty, whose ancestors hail from Bulgaria, explore this asterisk in the annals of the Holocaust. Their […]
Fifty seven years had elapsed since I watched Ship of Fools, and now I had the chance to revisit it thanks to the Turner Classic Movies channel. Would Stanley Kramer’s 2 hour-and-29-minute feature film be as absorbing, perceptive and impressive as it had been in 1965? Or would it be an outdated and kitschy relic best […]
Kantemir Balagov’s somber Russian-language movie, Closeness, set in the North Caucasus town of Nalchik, is a tense drama with a twist. Currently being screened online by the Toronto Jewish Film Foundation, it takes place in 1998, seven years after the breakup of the Soviet Union, and focuses on a Jewish family suddenly facing a crisis. Avi […]
Joseph Goebbels, Nazi Germany’s minister of propaganda, recognized the importance of movies as the regime’s primary method of communicating with and winning over the masses of Germans. From the moment Adolf Hitler ascended to power, Goebbels calculatingly used the film industry to his and the Nazis’ advantage. During an eventful period of 12 years, he was the […]
Metro- Goldwyn-Mayer released a morale-boosting film during World War II that has since been recognized as a Hollywood classic. It was recently broadcast by the Turner Classic Movies channel. Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo, directed by Melvyn LeRoy, with a screenplay by Dalton Trumbo, is based on a book written by Ted Lawson, a pilot who […]
Fred Zinnemann’s 1944 American drama, The Seventh Cross, is a rarity — one of the very few Hollywood movies about German concentration camps that was made during World War II. I saw it on the Turner Classic Movies channel. Adapted from a 1942 novel by the German refugee writer Anna Seghers, it was a commercial hit […]
Yuval Adler’s taut Middle Eastern thriller, Bethlehem, is a microcosm of Israel’s bitter and protracted conflict with the Palestinians. Now available for viewing on the ChaiFlicks streaming platform, Adler’s debut feature film unfolds menacingly in the West Bank Palestinian town of Bethlehem and in nearby Jerusalem during the second Palestinian uprising, which raged from 2000 […]