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Reviews
ZERV - Zeit der Abrechnung (2022)
A wonderful new series
An excellent series, with tension, unexpected humor, and great feeling, it conveys a difficult time for Germany, amid varying human corruptions. Well paced and well acted! Even the music selections are well chosen, and the series won major German awards, well deserved, for the lead actress and in two other categories. It was a surprise and it keeps a great pace all the way through the end, which provides hope that the series will be renewed. It also provides an excellent perspective on the difficulties of the German post-wall reunification, but with exceptional humor and sympathy for the lives affected.
The Red Danube (1949)
Strange to call this solid film controversial with what is known now
A solid film, which it is strange to see people calling controversial, since one would think that there would be little doubt any more about the nature of Soviet Communism, and the horrors perpetrated by Stalin. The cruelty of the allies turning over innocent expatriates to the Gulag and worse is rather convincingly portrayed. The moral dilemmas are decently examined, there are outbreaks of actual Christian faith and, of course there is a love story, because western audiences could hardly handle a movie without one. Barrymore is pungent, Leigh is beautiful, Lawford is sentimental, and Pigeon is as stiff as you could want a Brit to be. And Angela Lansbury makes a charming supportive appearance. Not a great movie, but a reasonably honest one which has nothing to do with McCarthyism and is definitely worth a viewing.
She's the One (1996)
Not an ambitious movie, but wryly comic and lightly insightful
Ed Burns specializes in quiet New York comedy, which makes full use of NYC quirks, ethnicities, and conflicts. He is also an incurable romantic, who tends to have himself pursuing romance in a city full of cynics -- sometimes even including himself, which is somewhat self-contradictory, but humorous. In this case, he is waffling on his true love, while his brother, married to Jennifer Aniston, is cheating on her with Cameron Diaz -- definitely an interesting question of taste -- and Diaz is a former girlfriend of Burns. The complications are not profound, but are gently comic, as are the required just deserts.
La vita è bella (1997)
A heartbreaking comedy, accomplishing an almost impossible task.
Until this movie, it was virtually impossible to imagine a comedy about the concentration camps, or the Jewish experience under Nazism. A group of major comedians has tried(Jerry Lewis, and more recently, Robin Williams), but all come a cropper. Benigni succeeds, in part by focussing the comedy on the heartbreaking task of a father trying to save his son by dissembling about the whole experience. What makes the comedy work is the constantly haunting pain, and what makes the pain more severe is the effort, and success, of the comedy.
The Nephew (1998)
A warm, human story of family conflict, with the added benefit of great Irish scenery
This is a little movie, but it accomplishes its task well, portraying the return of the son of a woman forced out of Ireland by her brother's restrictiveness and her pregnancy, and then cut off by her brother's manipulations. The son, who is half black (an initial shock to the Irish island community, but subordinate to everything else, though it does give a little edge to things) rekindles the old fights, which never had disappeared, until things are finally resolved in a tentative forgiveness.