The Light of Hope (La llum d’Elna), a Spanish-language film directed by Silvia Quer from a script by Margarita Melgar, begins in a celebratory mood, as Pat, a boy of nine or ten, runs through the grounds of an old estate in the French countryside, threading his way through a beehive of activity. What is…
Let’s get this out of the way immediately. Overlord isn’t another “Cloverfield” film. Not even a secret one. No twist in the third act, no Easter eggs, no post-credits scene. Much as I like the whole “Twilight Zone” mystery box thing the franchise has going for it, “The Cloverfield Paradox” was a major fumble and…
The Last Suit (El Último Traje), the second feature film by writer/director Pablo Solarz (“Intimate Stories”) is an Argentine/Spain production that follows the journey of Abraham Bursztein (Miguel Ángel Solá, “The Impatient Alchemist”) an 88-year-old holocaust survivor who found refuge in Argentina, where he created a life for himself, working as a tailor and raising…
It’s a rare piece of cinema that is able to hearken back to atrocities committed during World War II through spoken recollections in the midst of a home invasion plot, but that’s exactly what we’ve been given with Winter Hunt (“Winterjagd”). Astrid Schult has crafted a unique, aging Nazi thriller, brimming with unending desires to…
The term “Cold War,” especially in cinema, usually evokes images of espionage, militarism, geopolitics and stern men speaking tersely in jargon that is only comprehensible to those with a working knowledge of the genre. Pawel Pawlikowski (“The Woman in the Fifth”) defies such expectations with his film Cold War, a starkly beautiful romance that deftly…
Chris Weitz, director of “American Pie” and co-writer on last year’s “The Mountain Between Us,” delivers a watchable and important effort in Operation Finale, depicting the capture and extradition of Holocaust mastermind Adolf Eichmann. It’s a well-intentioned take on one of the ugliest personalities of the 20th century. Yet, its middling characterization and preference for…
An older major league baseball player becoming a spy for the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) during World War II to foil an atomic bomb plot has enough palpable atmosphere to be a compelling and pulpy noir. What is even more intriguing, is that it actually occurred. Based off the 1994 biography written by Nicholas…
