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The 2007 Academy Award winner for Best Foreign Language Film
casts a light on an obscure but fascinating facet of German war history: the
Nazi plot to counterfeit British pounds and American dollars to fund their
nearly bankrupt war effort. Karl Markovics stars as Salomon "Sally" Sorowitsch,
a legendary Jewish forger in 1936 Berlin who is plucked from the general
population of the death camps and ultimately put in charge of the secret forging
detail. It's his ticket to survival and he takes a personal interest in
protecting everyone in the unit, while the young Adolf Burger (August Diehl) is
ready to sabotage the process. The framing sequence (featuring Dolores Chaplin,
Charlie's granddaughter) is a bit glib but the camp scenes are vividly realized
and the central conflict -- self-survival vs. self-sacrifice -- is
made clear in terms we can understand. Like Sally, all we know of the war
outside the walls comes in the form of rumor and educated guesses from vague
information, and the only deaths we experience are of those people we've come to
know in the camp . Stefan Ruzowitzky directs and scripts from the nonfiction
book by Burger, a Holocaust survivor and printer who was part of the real-life
forgery detail. In German with English subtitles. Ruzowitzky provides
commentary in English and barely takes time for a breath as he fills the track
with production details and historical background. He's quick to point out how
much comes from the historical record and what is his dramatic fiction.
Ruzowitzky is also featured in the 13-minute "Q&A With Stefan Ruzowitzky,"
taped at his appearance at an AFI screening, and an 18-minute interview shot for
the DVD, both in English. Also features "Making the Counterfeiters" (a brief
promotional-style featurette in German), interviews with the real-life Burger
(in German) and star Markovics (in English), and "Adolf Burger's Artifacts," a
19-minute featurette with Burger describing his personal experience in the camps
and illustrating it with examples of the forgeries they printed, from postage
stamps to hard currency.
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| Nim's Island |
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Abigail Breslin is the remarkably capable Nim, a girl living on
a remote Pacific island with her explorer father (Gerard Butler) and a menagerie
of animal friends. Connected to the rest of the world by only phone and e-mail,
she sends out an SOS to an adventure author when her father goes missing. She
doesn't realize the masculine rescuer is actually an agoraphobic woman (Jodie
Foster), who has to overcome her fears when her own island is "invaded" by
modern-day pirates. Associated Press critic Christy Lemire describes the film as
"a movie for kids who like to think and read and use their imagination, and for
parents who may be tired of family fare that's nothing but a litany of cutesy
pop-culture references." The "adventure commentary" by stars Foster and Breslin
is an engaging conversation in which they compare their experiences making the
movie and explain how the film is made, without talking down to kids. Their
rapport makes it a lot of fun. Also features filmmaker commentary with directors
Mark Levin and Jennifer Flackett, three featurettes and deleted scenes. The
Blu-ray edition also offers a "Nim s Spyglass BonusView Mode" (a
picture-in-picture function with behind-the-scenes production footage and cast
and crew interviews) and bonus set-top games.
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| The Killing of John Lennon |
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Mark David Chapman's obsession with and murder of John Lennon is
cinematically reconstructed in Andrew Piddington's dramatic study, a
first-person dive inside the disturbed mind and deluded motivations of the
convicted killer. "Anchored by a fearless, commanding lead performance by
newcomer Jonas Ball as deranged assassin Mark David Chapman, 'The Killing of
John Lennon' is a harrowing, impressionistic, wide-screen tour de force that
unfolds with the propulsive urgency of a scrapbook thrown into a howling wind,"
writes Variety critic Eddie Cockrell. Piddington shot the film in a
quasi-documentary style in many of the locations where real-life events
occurred. Krisha Fairchild, Mie Omori and Robert Kirk co-star. The DVD features
commentary by writer/director Piddington and deleted scenes.
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| My Brother Is an Only Child |
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Daniele Luchetti teams up with the screenwriters of "Best of
Youth" for this small-scale survey of the political and social turbulence of
Italy in the 1960s. Elio Germano stars as the scrappy younger brother in a
left-leaning middle-class family who rebels by joining the Fascist party, more
out of contrariness than actual commitment. Riccardo Scamarcio is his activist
brother, a dedicated labor organizer and inconstant ladies' man who puts his
cause and his loved ones in jeopardy when he moves from social protest to
revolutionary violence. But behind this survey of the political movements that
led to the social terrorism of Italy in the '70s is a warm drama of commitment
and responsibility, and a portrait of the practical realities of political
action. In Italian with English subtitles.
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| Belphegor: Phantom of the Louvre |
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A top French cast and the grandiose backdrop of the Louvre set
off this silly ghost story like a gilt frame over a paint-by-numbers landscape.
Sophie Marceau wanders through an underground construction tunnel and into the
Louvre, where she embarks on an impromptu late-night tour and becomes possessed
by the ancient ghost of a restless Egyptian mummy that makes her swoop around
the museum in a black cape and an ominous mask. Michel Serrault is a retired
inspector who is reinstated to investigate the strange doings --
spontaneous suicides, missing artifacts, security guards driven mad -- and
Julie Christie and Frederic Diefenthal co-star. It's an exceedingly dumb
thriller with cheesy effects and impressive location photography doing all they
can to cover up a sloppy script. No supplements on the DVD, but it does offer an
alternate English-dub soundtrack in addition to the original French soundtrack
(with English subtitles).
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In addition to his regular contributions to MSN Movies, Sean Axmaker is a
film critic for the Seattle Post-Intelligencer and a DVD columnist for MSN
Entertainment. He is also a contributing writer for GreenCine.com, Turner
Classic Movies Online and Asian Cult Cinema, among other publications.
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Get Smart! Please!In honor of bumbling Maxwell
Smart, a brief history of our favorite clueless detectives On the RocksWith 'Iron Man' and 'Hancock' featuring
heavy-drinking protagonists, we reflect on the most memorable drunks in movie
history UnclassicsThough they may be listed among the
greatest films of all time, these 10 movies deserve to be
downgraded | |
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