Third Man, The

Into the Arms of Strangers: Stories of the Kindertransport, directed by Mark Jonathan Harris and narrated by Dame Judi Dench, manages the trick (as not all Holocaust documentaries do) of conveying strong emotion on the part of its subjects without ever seeming to exploit it or them. It tells the story of the 10,000 Jewish…

Arguing the World, a documentary directed by Joseph Dorman, is what a documentary should be. That is, it persuasively re-creates a historical milieu—in this case intellectual life in post-War New York—by telling a particular story. The story is that of City College in the 1930s and 1940s, known as “the Jewish Harvard,” where the sons…

Hollywood misses yet another chance to say something meaningful to teenagers, preferring as usual to flatter them

A genuinely moving story of a mother in search of her lost child which, nevertheless, suffers from an all-too familiar sort of self-righteousness

Poor Oscar Wilde! In death as in life he has been defined by his sexuality. To his contemporaries, all that mattered about him was his passion for a stupid and ungrateful youth, Lord Alfred, “Bosie” Douglas (here played by Jude Law), and the scandal of his prosecution for indecency. Then he was a sexual villain;…

Why is the U.S. Army out to get Wilhelm Furtwängler? Who knows why the U.S. Army does anything in the movies?