For the weekend beginning 11 April, here are the films in focus:
The Counterfeiters [rating: 8]
What’s clear about The Counterfeiters is that it is intended to be a Holocaust film where the archetypal facets associated with the era are reduced to a filmic footnote.
By now, you’d figure that the Holocaust and the Nazi persecution of European Jews would be all tapped out, creatively. After all, the last three decades have seen numerous media exposés and artistic interpretations. From the sublime to the subjective, Hitler’s Final Solution is one of the most well worn (and historically necessary) subjects tackled by filmmakers, and yet the potential storylines seem never ending. A perfect example is the 2008 Best Foreign Film winner Die Fälscher (translation: The Counterfeiters). Telling the true story of underworld crime figure Salomon Sorowitsch and his forced labor efforts on behalf of his SS captors, we wind up witnessing one of the most unusual and effective views of this undeniably horrific time ever offered. read full review…
The Dhamma Brothers [rating: 8]
(W)hat many will remember about this otherwise informative film is the way in which we get to know these men.
A comment from an official in charge of Alabama’s prison population says it all – the treatment of criminals in America has slowly shifted from rehabilitation and reclamation into society to pure, unadulterated punishment. It’s a waste, a warehousing mentality, the direct result of a sentencing guideline given where life without the possibility of parole is handed out with startling regularity…without consideration of the consequences or repercussions. Inmates don’t need care. They need caging. read full review…
Other Releases – In Brief
Street Kings [rating: 6]
There’s nothing new about crooked cops taking their suspect agenda out on unseemly street types for the sake of a morally ambiguous ends. Even more derivative is the double cross that ends up pitting police against each other in a surreal game of whose the most desperate and/or professionally bankruptcy. Coming from the pen of James Ellroy, who created the crackerjack L.A. Confidential, we have a Matrix-less Keanu Reeves as Detective Todd Ludlow, doing a decent job as an alcoholic hotshot who rights-violating past is coming back to haunt him. As an ex-partner prepares to rat him out to Internal Affairs, a gangland style assassination saves our hero’s reputation. But as he investigates the shooters, he stumbles upon a convoluted corruption storyline, complete with easily turned allies, unlikely suspects, and more oddball casting choices than a David Lynch drama. Training Day writer David Ayers delivers just enough moxie both behind and in front of the camera to keep us interested, and there are times when he even transcends the tired movie mechanics being employed. But Street Kings is not crime thriller royalty. Instead, it frequently plays like a perfunctory pretender to the throne.