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Tag: Daniel Bruhl

All Quiet on the Western Front–The Ugliness of War

All Quiet on the Western Front, an October 2022 Netflix release, is Germany’s submission for this year’s Academy Award. Based upon the 1929 antiwar novel by Erich Maria Remarque, we see a profound drama about idealistic teenage boys volunteering to join the Imperial German Army during the closing year (1917) of the First World War. Seventeen-year-old Paul Bäumer (the baby-faced Felix Kammerer in his first cinematic role) is excited about enlisting with his classmates Albert Kropp, Franz Müller, and Ludwig Behm. The glimmer and shiny aspect of battle dims as he and his friends...

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“The Alienist: Angel of Darkness” (Season Two)–Stranger Things Happen

In this  relatively seamless sequel to “The Alienist”, based on Caleb Carr’s second psychological thriller, season two is a retelling of Carr’s Angel of Darkness.  But this is much more than a sequel.  (For my review of season one, see my April 29, 2018 review:  “The Alienist”–Something Wicked This Way Comes). The year is 1897, a scant three years before the dawn of the 20th century, in the Gilded Age.  In New York City, a serial killer is kidnapping and murdering babies. Angel of Darkness opens with a grisly...

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“The Alienist”– Something Wicked This Way Comes

“The Alienist”, a TNT psychological thriller set in 1896, is based on the novel by Caleb Carr. People with mental illness were once considered “alienated from society,” unfathomable to doctors and laymen alike. Those who thought they could treat them were referred to as alienists, pre-dating the Freudian psychiatric movement by more than a decade. The Alienist foreshadows the Freudian theory of the unconscious, and the incipient emergence of forensics (including the first attempts at fingerprinting). If that is not enough, the series also foreshadows the suffragist...

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“Woman in Gold”—A Glimmer of Retribution

  The movie “Woman In Gold” is based on the remarkable story of the octogenarian Austrian-American woman, Maria Altmann (played by the always sensational Helen Mirren). Maria fights to reclaim the Gustav Klimt masterpiece of her aunt Adele Bloch-Bauer, a wealthy art collector of Klimt paintings. “Portrait of the Jewess Adele”. More popularly known as “The Woman in Gold”, this masterpiece was the Austrian equivalent of the “Mona Lisa”.     Art repatriation–the return of art looted or stolen from its country of origin or former owners (or their heirs)—is just becoming a political maelstrom....

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