Like a lonely, mysterious gunslinger from the Old West, a tall, slender rugged-looking man with a thick mustache comes to a small Bulgarian village near the Grecian border as part of a German work crew in Valeska Grisebach’s (“Longing”) Western. The man is Meinhard (Meinhard Neumann), in Bulgaria to work on a hydroelectric power station…
It’s tough being the new kid in school. You don’t know anyone around you or even if you will ever make any friends. There are so many circumstances that can make an experience like this unsettling. It’s even harder when you’re also new to an entire country and culture that doesn’t understand what you say…
Actor James Newcomb said, “There are individuals who come along in certain periods of time who advance the human spirit to the next level.” Such an individual was Polish violinist Bronsilaw Huberman, recognized, alongside that of Heifetz, Szigetti, and Kreisler, as among the great violin virtuosos of the twentieth century. What is not widely known,…
The story of Fury is harsh, straightforward, swift and breathtaking. And it is remarkable to bear witness to Don ‘Wardaddy’ Collier (Brad Pitt, “World War Z”) leading a Sherman tank crew through the German countryside toward Berlin in spring of 1945. The aesthetic qualities too are remarkably immersive — from the .50 caliber anti-tank fire…
In the late 1990s, Egyptian born Mohammed Atta, whom it is believed was one of the pilots of the September 11, 2001 attack on the World Trade Center, is reported to have established Islamist contact and formed a terrorist cell while a student in Hamburg, Germany. This fact has alerted the intelligence community in Hamburg…
Set in Communist East Germany in the early 1980s, cold war paranoia is in full view in Christian Petzold’s Barbara, winner of the Silver Berlin Bear for Best Director at the Berlinale. In Barbara, Petzold has fashioned not only a superb character study but a film that illuminates the effects of oppression on the human…
