Film
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The Schmooze ‘Ida’: Conversation with Director Pawel Pawlikowski
“Ida,” a fascinating and disquieting Polish language film written and directed by Pawel Pawlikowski, is a post-Soviet Polish rumination, a mystery with religious and political overtones. Pronounced as “Eeda,” Pawlikowski told me during our chat: “I needed a good name and remembered the Jewish Polish actress Ida Kaminska. It was a name I liked, but…
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The Schmooze Polish Drama in Black and White
Shot in rich black and white, “Ida” is a quiet, deliberately paced study of the end of innocence for a young Polish woman, Anna, raised an orphan in a convent. It is the early 1960s. On the verge of taking her vows, the Mother Superior tells Anna that her only living relative, an aunt, wants…
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Culture ‘Ida’ Revisits Poland in the Shadow of the Holocaust
Pawel Pawlikowski left Poland at the age of 14, but his childhood memories of his homeland never left him. It’s no surprise then that “Ida,” a stunning portrait of two very different women whose lives intersect in 1960s Poland, is the director’s most assured and confident narrative feature yet. The film takes place in the…
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The Schmooze Josef Mengele in Patagonia
It seems apt that a renowned figure of evil — the Nazi doctor Josef Mengele, the so-called “Angel of Death,” notorious for his cold-blooded “selections” at Auschwitz — should inspire a film whose mood is at once mysterious and sinister, yet whose visual style is strangely poetic, perhaps even terrifyingly beautiful. In the space of…
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Culture When the Family Doctor Turns Out To Be Josef Mengele
“The German Doctor,” a film that Argentinian filmmaker Lucia Puenzo adapted from her novel “Wakolda,” begins with a chance meeting: A mysterious, good-looking doctor and a teenager at a service station. Soon, the doctor is asking for directions, following her family through winding Patagonia roads to a beautiful vacation spot. While the doctor is based…
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The Schmooze The Most Boring Job in the Army
Movies about the army are usually about fighting, sacrifice, a tense atmosphere and people in uniform plotting war strategies. “Zero Motivation,” the first feature film by Israeli director Talya Lavie, shows a different aspect of military life: Set in an army base in the Israeli desert in 2004, it tells the story of a group…
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Film & TV Penka Kouneva Wants to Blast Hollywood’s Celluloid Ceiling
Courtesy Penka Kouneva // From left to right, Jeremy Borum, Penka Kouneva and Nathan Furst working on the Dreamworks feature “Need for Speed” At six, Penka Kouneva was playing piano in her hometown of Sofia, Bulgaria. At 12, she was composing music for children’s theater. At 17, a song of hers won a Japanese competition…
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The Schmooze A Holocaust Movie Without a Soul
“Walking With the Enemy” has brave Jews standing up to the Nazi death machine. It has helpless Jews loaded onto cattle cars. It has good Germans unwilling to participate in the eradication of a people. It has both Hungarian anti-Semites and Hungarian nuns who sheltered the oppressed. In short it has everything a good Holocaust…
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